Re: Unlimited Categories and Sub-Categories

> Thanks, but how would I perform the select query? If possible, please >include a code sample. I think this needs to be done with a recursive function. Say you have a table like this: category_id, parent_id, cat_desc 1,1, cat1 2,1, next category 3, 2, third category 4, 2, fourth category So above cat_id 1 is a 'top-level category', and you know this because the category and partent_id are the same. cat_id 2 is a child of cat_id 1 and both three and four are childre of cat_id 2. To get an entire listing of these, say indented with <ul> and <li> tags, you you need to do something like the following. This could use static variables, for the sake of this example I didn't bother. function print_recursive($category_id = 1, $counter=1) { echo "<ul>"; if ($counter==1) { /* the first time through you want a top-level list */ $query = "select category_id, parent_id, cat_desc from recur where category_id = parent_id"; } else { /* make sure to exclude top-level rows, or this will loop endlessly */ $query = "select * from recur where parent_id = $category_id and category_id != parent_id"; } $result = mysql_query($query); while(list($category_id, $parent_id, $cat_desc) = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) { echo "<li>" . $category_id . $parent_id . $cat_desc . "<br>"; /* the function now calls iteslf with a new category_id */ print_recursive($category_id, ++$counter); } echo "</ul>"; } print_recursive(); Recursion can be a pretty tough topic at first. If you don't undersatnd it immediately, follow it through and see what happens to the variables with each iteration. HTH, jay