Ignore duplicate records

How do I pull data by ignoring duplicate records?

E.g. I've got 100 types of books and a field in mysql saying 'category'. In the books I've got 20 books as history, 5 books as agriculture, etc...

I need the data displayed only the types of categories.

history

agriculture

etc...

$SomeVar = $_POST['finco'];
$query = "SELECT * FROM  abcs WHERE typesz = '".$SomeVar."' ORDER BY typesz ASC";
$results = mysql_query($query);

$returnS="";
while($line = mysql_fetch_array($results))
{

Hi

Select just the category and use DISTINCT.

All the best

Keith

Thanks. One more thing, How can I add a condition to it.

E.g. Retun the data using DISTINCT only when "YES" is found in field AVAILABILITY?

Hi

DISTINCT returns unique rows. So just put a where cause to exclude unwanted rows first.

SELECT DISTINCT category
FROM bookTable
WHERE availability = 'YES'

Note that if you return other columns of data the code will return distinct combinations. So you could have 2 categories of agriculture returned if the other field was different. Logically if you still want only a single occurrence of each category to be returned then you need to specify which one is returned.

All the best

Keith