counting issue

[peanuts]

I was wondering... I want to count the times a certain value is in the database... I don't know the value dough...

For instance ...

I have a table visitors
with
visit_id
firstname
lastname
gender
etc...

now I want to create a report that shows all the firstnames (but only once) and I want to show the number that a firstname exists..

I know I can do something like

$sql = "select distinct firstname from visitors";
$result = @mysql_query($sql);
While($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$name = $row["firstname"]
echo "firstname = $name";
$sql2 = "count("firstname") as num where firstname = '$name'";
$result2 = ($sql2);
echo $result["num"];
}
?> 

But I was wondering if there is a better way of doing something like this...

Greets

Peanuts

[burchyk]

Your quiery should be:
select firstname , count(firstname) from db.table group by firstname

It will return you two columns:
firstname(once) | times found

[peanuts]

Originally posted by burchyk
Your quiery should be:
select firstname , count(firstname) from db.table group by firstname

It will return you two columns:
firstname(once) | times found

Would that also change the way I echo the data ???

Or is it still just

select firstname , count(firstname) as num from db.table group by firstname

and then

echo $row["num"]

???

thanks in advance..

Peanuts

[burchyk]

I think it may look like this:

for ($i=0; $i<$num_results; $i++)
{
$row=mysql_fetch_array($result);
print($row["firstname"]." ".$row["count(firstname)"]."<br>");
} 

Formatting is yours

[peanuts]

Its working thanks