grouping people

[sinewaves]

This is kind of hard to explain what i mean but here goes....

i have a table with a number of people, similar to an address book... i would like to sort them alphabetically by name, grouped by the city they live in but i would like the output to be like so in the html

CITY #1 - New york

Person #1's detail - from new york
Person #3's detail - from new york

CITY #2 - LA

Person #2's detail - from LA

CITY #3 - Chicago

Person #3's detail - from Chicago

- now i already know how to get information from the database and what not, and i know the html for it, but what i cant figure out is how do i have it spit out each City and put the people under that city that live there

Hope this makes some sense

[thexchord]

i didn't really understand your problem, but may be the SQL SELECT clause "GROUP BY" is what you need?

[sinewaves]

not really because i want to actually OUTPUT the group name...i think i could do a group by and then do an if statement to see if its changed, but i'm not having much luck.

[scoutt]

you can do 2 queries, as that might be the best bet.

$sql = mysql_query("select distinct state from table");
   while($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)){
             $sql2 = mysql_query("select name from table where state = '".$row["state"]."' ");
                  while($row2 = mysql_fetch_array($sql2)){
                           //get fileds here and display
                  }
     } 

something like that

[ubunreal69]

wont it work if you sort the names then grou them by location ?