Selective SELECT?

PHP
1

I want to select some records from a table and display them(let’s illustrate with this example) -:

$sql=mysql_query("select headline,body from theTable where id='$id' order by id DESC"); 
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($sql))
{
echo "<strong>".$row['headline']."</strong><p/>";
echo $row['body']."<p/>";
}

The code above makes ALL the headlines to be bold,but what i want is to make ONLY the first displayed headline to be bold - not all the results.The question is - is there a way to selectively format a particular row from a result set, how do i twist the code above to allow for this?

What seems to be a solution, is to use 2 SELECT queries - one for the row of interest, and the other for the other rows, apart from being inefficient, there’s an obvious flaw with
this…[obvious]

2

<p/> is only valid in real XHTML and IE doesn’t support real XHTML at all so there isn’t a conflict between the two sonce they can’t be used together.

<p/> while valid is also semantically meaningless which means that it should never be used even though it is valid in real XHTML.

3

IE seems to have a lot of trouble with some self-closing tags. Not sure if this applies to P tags, but I’ve had <div/> tags causing the browser to crash big time (which was pretty awesome, of course :slight_smile: )

4

an empty paragraph? you shouldn’t really use those. enclose your text in paragraphs and then use CSS to adjust the margins between them.

here’s how I’d do it:

$highlighted = array(1);

while($row=mysql_fetch_array($sql))
{
	$i++;
    if(in_array($i,$highlighted)) {
	  echo "<p><strong>", htmlspecialchars($row['headline']), "</strong></p>";
    }
    else echo "<p>", htmlspecialchars($row['headline']), "</p>";
    
    echo "<p>", htmlspecialchars($row['body']), "</p>";
}

now you can replace $highlighted = array(1); with $highlighted = array(3,7,9); to emphasise those ones. With a slight variation you could also turn this into highlighting every 5th/10th/etc. headline - I don’t have the time to write code for this though, let me know if you need this one and I’ll have a look later.

5

then what about my other suggestion? cranial-bore’s solution is good if you only want to catch the first headline, my suggestion of using a dummy variable and increase it through the loop would enable you to address any row you want.

6 

$first = true;
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($sql))
{
	//First record
	if($first) {
		echo "<p><strong>", htmlspecialchars($row['headline']), "</strong></p>";
		$first = false;
	}
	else echo "<p>", htmlspecialchars($row['headline']), "</p>";
	
	echo "<p>", htmlspecialchars($row['body']), "</p>";
}

You need to open paragraphs, not just close them. And you close a paragraph with </p> not <p/>

7

I don’t know the value of $id, it changes…what i meant to write was:

$sql=mysql_query(“select headline,body from theTable order by id DESC”);

8

why not use an if statement in there? in simple terms an if id = xx then echo strong end if, … and another if for /strong, or a combined if/else. Or create a dummy variable and count it up in the while loop and use that in your if statement instead of the id.

Loved to hear opinions on this and alternative suggestions.

9

replicaBAGA, please go jump off a tall bridge.
I’m not buying your crap from you!

10

Yeah, IE tends to show weird ‘Navigation cancelled’ error dialogs when it encounters self-closed tags that it isn’t expecting. In all fairness, as you said, it’s not really IE’s fault. It just sucks that IE doesn’t do application/xml+xhtml, pretty much causing the failure of proper XHTML and imploding the space-time continuum.

Damn IE!

11

Thanks for all the suggestions, i will adapt them to the project im working on. The “<p/>” is supposed to be a standalone paragraph tag.

@c2uk, Your other suggestion is great - it is more general, will appreciate if you can help with the actual code.