Display number of items in category / subcategory

In many cases, one might want to display the number of items found in a category / subcategory. This is specially the case for classifieds websites.

For example,

Vehicles (30)

• Cars  (15)
• Bikes (13)
• Other (2)

This can be done by querying the database. In this case, I am using MySQL.

Let’s assume that we are passing the category id in the URL. So,

1. Get the category id from the URL

$cat = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['category']);

2. Query the database with that id

$query = 'SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM vehicles WHERE catId = '$cat'";

3. Build the query

$result = mysql_query($query);

4. Get the resulting row

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

5.  Finally, get the count field from the resulting row (this is the data we want)

$num_items_in_category = $row['count'];

Your comments are welcomed.