Create Category Headings when displaying SQL data using PHP

Question

I have a menu for a website that I am pulling all of the information from a mySQL database. I am trying to find a way to sort the food into categories with headings.

Answer 1

Initialize a category variable before you start fetching rows.

$category = null;

After you fetch each row, compare that row's category to the previous category. If it's different, output the header. Then that category becomes the new previous category.

while ($new_row = mysql_fetch_array($new_result)) {
    if ($new_row['category'] != $category) {
        echo "<h1>$new_row[category]</h1>";
        $category = $new_row['category'];
    }
    // ... rest of your while loop contents ...

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By the way, the mysql extension has been deprecated for quite a while and was removed in the current version of PHP. You should look into updating your code to use mysqli or PDO instead.