How To Break Query Output into Pages in MySQL?

If you have a query that returns hundreds of rows, and you don't want to present all of them to your users on a single page. You can break output into multiple pages, and only present 10 rows per page like what Google Website is doing. To do this, you need to modify your query with the LIMIT clause to return rows starting from the correct row number, and limited to 10 rows in the output.

The tutorial exercise below shows you how to break output into pages with 2 rows per page. It also calculates the total number of pages with a simple query criteria and order by condition. As an example, rows for page number 2 are returned.

<?php
  include "mysql_connection.php";
 
  $rowsPerPage = 2;
  $where = " WHERE url LIKE '%co%'";
  $order = " ORDER BY time DESC";
  
  $curPage = 2; 
  $start = ($curPage-1) * $rowsPerPage; 

  $sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) AS count FROM fyi_links" . $where . $order;
  print("SQL = $sql\n");
  $rs = mysql_query($sql, $con);
  $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($rs);
  $numberOfPages = $row['count'] / $rowsPerPage; 
  print("Number of pages = $numberOfPages\n");
  mysql_free_result($rs);
  
  $sql = "SELECT * FROM fyi_links" . $where . $order
    . " LIMIT ".$start.", ".$rowsPerPage;
  print("SQL = $sql\n");
  $rs = mysql_query($sql, $con);
  while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($rs)) {
    print($row['id'].", ".$row['url'].", "
    . $row['notes'].", ".$row['time']."\n");
  }
  mysql_free_result($rs);

  mysql_close($con); 
?>

If you run this script, you will get something like this:

SQL = SELECT COUNT(*) AS count FROM fyi_links 
   WHERE url LIKE '%co%' ORDER BY time DESC
Number of pages = 3

SQL = SELECT * FROM fyi_links WHERE url LIKE '%co%' 
   ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 2, 2
101, dev.fyicenter.com, , 2006-07-01 20:24:46
102, dba.fyicenter.com, Nice site., 2006-07-01 20:24:46

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