Investigating PHP _ Combining Multiple Arrays
I don't write code or webpages for a living but find learning and playing with PHP, XHTML and JavaScript more fun than doing crosswords. I came across computer coding when studying for a degree, but was so busy jumping through hoops set by the examiners that I never really got to actually learn the code in depth. I am now going back to the books I used at the time and working my way through them at my leisure, stopping off and investigating techniques and ideas that I could not explore earlier.The 2 books that I used were PHP & MySQL for Dummies by Janet Valade(a great reference book); and PHP & MySQL for Dynamic Websites by Larry Ullman (edition 2; edition 4 now out). I also trawled through the PHP manual site and came across lots of helpful stuff on other pages I found from search engine queries.
First Try
When I came to Chpt8 of Ullman's book, I wondered if his script on page 305 could also be written by sending the results of a SELECT query to an array and sorting the array rather than using the SELECT query itself to sort the results.His scripts can be found at http://www.larryullman.com/books/mysql-visual-quickstart-guide-2nd-edition/#downloads. The one I was interested in was 8.6. The conditionals (if elseif else) are neater in this first version although I wonder if using case conditionals would have been even better. The problem was that the links had to go at the bottom of the page and I wanted them at the top. To fix this I needed to use positioning in the css file (below) which I felt was a bit of a hack. This is one take on that script 8.6 (without the edit or delete bit).
The css file is named beasts.css
.sort{
position: relative;
left: 0px;
top: 10px;
}
.list{
position:absolute;
top: 30px;
left: 10px;
}
Second Try
This one is less elegant since I had to use 2 sets of conditionals to get it to work. But it doesn't require the css file with the position tags as everything just falls into place more naturally.I run php and a mysql database on apache server run on Ubuntu 10.10 in VirtualBox.
The structure and table is as per the image below:
All the code has been tested for compliance with the W3C validator and passed OK.