displaying paragraph vs list items from a database

[ketanco]

Hi,
New to php and mysql but I got a question:

Lets say I am creating a database table with coulmns like in below for a news portal website:

story title
first paragraph
second paragraph
third paragraph
...
...
contact info

I would want the title display in some format and paragraphs in another format and the contact info another etc...

My question is:

If lets say there needs to be a list item in between two paragraphs (but this wont be the case always), can I insert that list within the paragraph text in the database within the paragraph such as
<ul>
<li>...</li>
<li>...</li>
</ul>
, and it will display as a list in the website? Or do I need to have a seperate column in the table for a listed item? But the location and size of list item (if any) will be different for each article. So I thought I should not make a column for listed items, but insert in one of the paragraph columns. So the question is will it display correctly and how can I do that?



Thanks

[paulkoan]

There is a problem with your table design. If each paragraph needs its own column, then what happens when your article has one more paragraph than you have columns?

An alternative would be:

ArticleID
ParagraphNumber
Paragraph

So records might look like this:

ArticleID    ParagraphNumber   Paragraph
1              1                        This is the first paragraph
1              2                        This is the second paragraph
1              3                        This is the third paragraph

Then to pull the data out:

   select Paragraph from article where ArticleID = $article order by ParagraphNumber asc

This will return an array with $article's paragraphs in the right order, and then you can loop through the array and display them however your site needs.