Webmaster Sucks Here I share stuff I used to suck at as a novice webmaster..

Sort VARCHAR as INT in MySQL

Sometimes we can user VARCHAR for integer values. But when we need sort them, we have got big problem. Because VARCHAR’s are string and it is sorting like a string.

Example:

1a 2a 3a 10b 20b 30b 15c 25c 35c (VARCHAR)

1a 10b 15c 2a 20b 25c 3a 30b 35c (Sorted)

We need

1a 2a 3a 10b 15c 20b 25c 30b 35c (Sorted integer)

We can do it with mysql CAST

SELECT vNumber FROM table ORDER BY CAST(`vNumber` AS SIGNED)

Reverse order

SELECT vNumber FROM table ORDER BY CAST(`vNumber` AS SIGNED) DESC

Other possible conversion types you may need are:

BINARY[(N)]
CHAR[(N)]
DATE
DATETIME
DECIMAL[(M[,D])]
SIGNED [INTEGER]
TIME
UNSIGNED [INTEGER]


You can find more about CAST -> MySQL docs here.

Recursive Category Listing

Webmasters allways use category trees, i wrote a function about creating category trees with using recursive function.

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/mysql.inc.php");

function categories($firstCategory,$node)
{
	$kQ = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM categories WHERE category= ".$firstCategory);
	if(mysql_num_rows($kQ) > 0)
	{
		echo(str_repeat("\t",$node+1)."<ul>\n");
		$node++;
		while($k = mysql_fetch_array($kQ))
		{
			//str_repeat is for "view source" format, we set TAB character for readable HTML
			echo(str_repeat("\t",$node)."<li>".($node+1)." ".$k["name"]."</li>\n");

			// Recursive, call function it self
			categories($k["id"], $node);
		}
		echo(str_repeat("\t",$node)."</ul>\n");
	}
}
categories(0,-1);
?>

Output :

• Food
  • Fruits
    • Apple
    • Banana
  • Vegetables
    • Tomatoes
    • Aborgin
• Drinks
  • Soft
    • Fruit Juice
      • Apple Juice
      • Strawberry Juice
    • Milk