Populate HTML table from MYSQL and counting rows

Question

I'm trying to populate a HTML table with mysql data, I have the following data in Mysql:

ID, IP, Referal

I want to create a table that shows a list of the referals and how often they occur, for example:

ID,    IP,      Referal
1     1.1.1.1   google.com
2     2.2.2.2   google.com
3     3.3.3.3   test.com
4     4.4.4.4   another.com

Should output:

google.com     2
test.com       1
another.com    1

What I've tried was this:

<table class="table table-bordered table-primary">
<tbody>
<?php
$sql="SELECT * FROM traffic";
$result=mysql_query($sql);
?>
<?php while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { ?>
<tr >
<td class="tc"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><?php if($row['referal']==''){
echo "Empty Referal";
} else { echo $row['referal']; }?></font></td>

<td class="tc"><center><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><?php $referal = $row['referal'];
$sql="SELECT COUNT(*) FROM traffic WHERE referal = $referal";
$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);

echo "$num_rows";

?></font></center></td>

</tr>
                    <?php } ?>
            </tbody>
        </table>

But that didn't count each refer individually, also it created a new table row for each entry even if the referal was the same.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The thing is that you are gathering the amount of rows found in your last query and NOT your count query:

$sql="SELECT COUNT(*) FROM traffic WHERE referal = '$referal'";
$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);

First off, the COUNT command will return you a single row with a single column containing the count found. You should use the following:

$sql="SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM traffic WHERE referal = '$referal'";
$numResult = mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query($sql));
$num_rows = $numResult['count'];

Also, it is VERY unneeded to put quotes around a variable you are echoing. This will suffice:

echo $num_rows; //NOT echo "$num_rows";

NOTICE: Do not use MySQL_* functions as they have been deprecated as of PHP 5.5. Use MySQLi_* or PDO instead.

Answer 2

You are probably looking for the GROUP BY keyword of SQL:

SELECT Referal, COUNT(*) FROM traffic GROUP BY Referal

This will give you exactly the table you want, without any additional for-loop in php