23.1. Building HTML Tables from SQL Queries

Perhaps the simplest task you can perform with a database and PHP is to extract data from a table and display it in an HTML table. The table could contain a catalog of items for sale, a list of projects, or a list of Internet name servers and their ping times. For illustration purposes, I'll use the first scenario. Imagine that a supermarket wants to list the items it has for sale on its Web site. As a proof of concept, you must create a page that lists some items from a database. We'll use the test database that's created when MySQL is installed. The PHP script for viewing the catalog of products will reside on the same machine as the database server.

The first step is to create the table. Listing ...

Get Core PHP Programming, Third Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.