PHP MySQL Use The ORDER BY Clause

PHP MySQL Use The ORDER BY Clause

Select and Order Data From a MySQL Database

The ORDER BY clause is used to sort the result-set in ascending or descending order.

The ORDER BY clause sorts the records in ascending order by default. To sort the records in descending order, use the DESC keyword.

SELECT column_name(s) FROM table_name ORDER BY column_name(s) ASC|DESC 

To learn more about SQL, please visit our SQL tutorial.

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Select and Order Data With MySQLi

The following example selects the id, firstname and lastname columns from the MyGuests table. The records will be ordered by the lastname column:

Example (MySQLi Object-oriented)

<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "myDB";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
  die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

$sql = "SELECT id, firstname, lastname FROM MyGuests ORDER BY lastname";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
  // output data of each row
  while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo "id: " . $row["id"]. " - Name: " . $row["firstname"]. " " . $row["lastname"]. "<br>";
  }
} else {
  echo "0 results";
}
$conn->close();
?>

Run example »

Code lines to explain from the example above:

First, we set up the SQL query that selects the id, firstname and lastname columns from the MyGuests table. The records will be ordered by the lastname column. The next line of code runs the query and puts the resulting data into a variable called $result.

Then, the function num_rows() checks if there are more than zero rows returned.

If there are more than zero rows returned, the function fetch_assoc() puts all the results into an associative array that we can loop through. The while() loop loops through the result set and outputs the data from the id, firstname and lastname columns.

The following example shows the same as the example above, in the MySQLi procedural way: