PHP newbie, project feasibility

Try apache2triad. Google it for more info.

Thanks, downloaded and installed, and it does indeed look very good.

Anyone able to comment on how tricky the project I described would be for a newbie, or indeed an expert?

I was considering breaking it down slightly, and initially just building a page that takes a comma-delimited text file as an input with the basic data for the table, and PHP takes that, sorts the rows, and displays it. Would that be particularly tricky, or perhaps more suitable for a newbie?

Anyone able to give me, or knock up, a sample bit of PHP code that would take the following text file (called statistics.txt)...

Player 1, 4, 140, 38, 35, 35.0
Player 2, 5, 200, 46, 36, 40.0
Player 3, 4, 150, 40, 35, 37.5

...sort it based on the last column, and display it in a table?

Once I've got that, I can then expand it and develop it to pull the data from a database, and then onto the actual inputting of data into the DB.

The project seems like a good place to get your feet wet with php / mysql. Initially it looks pretty simple. I would recommend using a db rather than text file so that mysql can do the math and sorting rather than relying on php for sorting.

Thanks for the reply. I've actually had a look around this site and discovered some code snippets here, which shows how to build a page that simply stores and retrieves data from a DB.

I'm going to have a play with that, and see if I can make any sense of it.

Right, I can see how to interact with a DB now. The next step, for my submit page I want to pull all the player names from a table in the database, and have those names available under a drop-down list (via the form OPTION VALUE="name" method).

The only way I can think of doing this would be to pull the values from the DB, get the number of hits and form a WHILE loop, to repeat the OPTION VALUE="" for as many times as there are names.

Is this the way to do it? If so, how do I construct it? If not, what is the best way?

It would look something like this:

$sql = mysql_query("select name from table_name");

while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)) {

echo ("OPTION VALUE='$row[name]' ");

}

Hope this helps

Woo hoo! PHP is starting to make sense to me! Thanks - I've got it updating the database now.

Now I know there is a DB section on this site, but I figured most of the background is in here, so I'll pose my next query here too...

I've now hit upon my next weakness; joining tables in SQL. I'm *okay* with nesting SQL queries, but I've just discovered that pre-MySQL 4.1 doesn't support nested queries, only joins. :cry:

I've got 3 tables:

matches - matchid, date, homeaway, season
players - playerid, fullname, nickname
scoreslist - scoreid, playerid, matchid, score

And as mentioned previously, I need to retrieve the appropriate scores (for the current season - 2004), and produce an ordered table of statistics (ordered on average column) as shown below - I've added notes on what each column relates to in the DB:

Player Name (players.fullname)
Games Played (just a count of the number of scores relating to a player this season)
Aggregate (the sum of all those scores relating to a player)
Highest (highest value from that list of scores)
Lowest (lowest value from that list of scores)
Average (games played / aggregate)

I'm having real problems knowing where to begin, and looking for guidance really. If only it supported nested queries! :-|

Actually, even my nested skills obviously aren't up to scratch - all I've got so far is...

SELECT playerid, score
FROM scoreslist
WHERE IN (
SELECT matchid
FROM matches
WHERE season =2004
)

I've got the added problem of MySQL not having linked tables enabled, although from what I've read this can be worked around? I'm thinking for linking the scores (through playerid) to the fullnames column.

Actually, even my nested skills obviously aren't up to scratch - all I've got so far is...

SELECT playerid, score
FROM scoreslist
WHERE IN (
SELECT matchid
FROM matches
WHERE season =2004
)

I've got the added problem of MySQL not having linked tables enabled, although from what I've read this can be worked around? I'm thinking for linking the scores (through playerid) to the fullnames column.

Actually, that should be...

SELECT playerid, score
FROM scoreslist
WHERE matchid in (
SELECT matchid
FROM matches
WHERE season =2004
);

I've installed MySQL 4.1 now, purely for development purposes. Anything I develop will have to be converted back for pre-4.1.

Any ideas how I can link the scores to the fullnames in that query, without using linked tables?

SELECT nickname, count( * ) , sum( score ) , max( score ) , min( score ) , avg( score )
FROM players, scoreslist
WHERE players.playerid = scoreslist.playerid AND scoreslist.matchid
IN (

SELECT matchid
FROM matches
WHERE season =2004
)
GROUP BY nickname
ORDER BY avg( score ) DESC

Here's my final(ish) nested query. There's only the one nest in there, but I'm still at a loss to know how to convert it to a non-nested query. Can anyone help?

PS. I'm very nearly there!!