How to use PHP to display multiple single cells from mysql database using another cell in the same row as an index or reference

Question

I'm an interaction designer building out front_end HTML design. I am new to PHP, but old hand with HTML and quick to new technology. I'm hoping someone can help me out. I've done a few hours of research and can't find the answer to in any forum so far to my very specific problem.

GOAL: I'd like a nice way to display various discrete cells of data from my database into my HTML designs. Specifically, I'd like to be able to display a given 'title' on my page design by referencing a unique id in the same row of the database. Here's what one row looks like...

'unique_id' 'title' 'description' 'image'

What I need is a simple way to pull individual cells from an array using some small code snippet. Something like this:

<li class="active"><a href="#"><?php echo [unique_id][title];?></a></li>

...where unique_id would work as an index that would tell the array which row to look at, and then display the title from that same row.

I have a hunch it has to do with indexed arrays and some special loops, but I am very lost. Your help, but more importantly teaching me so I can learn, would be most appreciated.

Here's what I have currently, but it doesn't work because it's only going off the incremental row order (0..., 1..., 2...). What I need is for those numbers to be unique_ids for the rows, like (1005..., 104..., 106...).

<?php
                $sql = "SELECT title FROM phones";
                $result = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
                $array = array();

                while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
                $array[] = $row;
            }
            ?>

            <ul class="nav nav-list">
              <li class="nav-header">iOS Phones</li>
              <li class="active"><a href="#"><?php echo $array[0][title];?></a></li>
              <li><a href="#"><?php echo $array[1][title]?></a></li>

Christopher

Answer 1

As far as I understand, you wish to list the titles along with their unique ID's?

It can be achieved using MySQL & PHP like this:

<?php
$sql = "SELECT * FROM phones";
$result = mysqli_query($sql);

echo "<ul>";
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) { 
  echo "<li><a href='#'>" . $row["unique_id"] . " - " . $row["title"] . "</a></li>";
}
echo "</ul>";
?>

This will output something like this:

<ul>
<li><a href='#'>100 - HelloWorld</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>101 - AnotherTitle</a></li>
</ul>

And so forth.. You can order the outputs alphabetically by title or by the unique ID's. This can be done by adding ORDER BY title or ORDER BY unique_id to the end of your $sql variable.

What it does is just loop through all the database entries received from SELECT * FROM phones . Every row will be put into a $row array.

I hope this helped a bit.