How can PHP beginners effectively utilize structured query language (SQL) to retrieve and display data from related tables like news and comments?

To retrieve and display data from related tables like news and comments using SQL in PHP, beginners can utilize JOIN queries to combine data from multiple tables based on a related column. By selecting the necessary columns and using appropriate JOIN conditions, they can fetch data from both tables and display it in a structured manner on their webpage. 

<?php
// Establish a connection to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Retrieve news and comments data using a JOIN query
$sql = "SELECT news.title, news.content, comments.comment FROM news
        LEFT JOIN comments ON news.id = comments.news_id";

$result = $conn->query($sql);

// Display the retrieved data
if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        echo "Title: " . $row["title"]. "<br>";
        echo "Content: " . $row["content"]. "<br>";
        echo "Comment: " . $row["comment"]. "<br><br>";
    }
} else {
    echo "0 results";
}

$conn->close();
?>

Keywords

PHP SQL data retrieval related tables display data

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