How to display a MySQL database record only once when duplicates exist in PHP?

Question

Suppose my db looks like this:

id | person_id | hobby       | time
-----------------------------------
1  | 67        | golf        | mon
2  | 33        | reading     | tues
3  | 67        | baseball    | fri
4  | 67        | golf        | sun

I want to display a list of all the hobbies of person with id 67 on a page.

If I do this:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM hobbies WHERE person_id = '67'");

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {

   echo $row['hobby'];

}

I wil get:

golf
baseball
golf

I want duplicate hobbies entered by the same person id to show only once, so it will show:

golf
baseball

And by duplicate I mean however many redundant times the same hobby by the same person is entered in a database (as long as it's more than once it should shown only once).

How can this be done?

alex · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-24 03:01:20Z

15

$query = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT `hobby` FROM `hobbies` WHERE `person_id` = '67'");

DISTINCT will not show duplicates for hobby.

Documentation.

answered Jul 24, 2010 at 3:01

alex

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2 Comments

Tony Over a year ago

doesn't work for me, it just returns nothing when I change * to DISTINCT. But even if that wasn't so I don't think this will do, because the same hobby by the same person will still be distinct in that there ids will be different as may the column "time".

Tony Over a year ago

oops sorry, I implemented it wrong, yes it does work. Best answer in 10 mins. thanks.

Stephen · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-03 09:04:01Z

2

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM hobbies WHERE person_id = '67' GROUP BY hobby");

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {
   echo $row['hobby'];
}

edited Jan 3, 2012 at 9:04

Stephen

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answered Jan 3, 2012 at 9:01

Hussain

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