How to display a list of usernames when you have an array of USERIDs?

Question

I hope someone can answer me this question. This will substantially answer my other question (https://www.question2answer.org/qa/87862/how-to-display-avatar-when-you-have-userid).

Let's say we have an array of USERIDs after doing some MySQL query

SELECT userid from ^posts WHERE ....

So the $userids will have values like 13, 29, 173, 544.

How do you turn this array into a horizontal list of Usernames like:

Xavier, antmant125, Huckleberry Finn, Elton_Jim

Comments

Can you modify the original query to return more data than just the user IDs? That should allow you to query all the data you need in one go.

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In ^posts table there is only userid that is related to user information.

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But you could join it with the users and optionally the blobs table to get that information: "SELECT ... FROM ^posts p JOIN ^users u ON p.userid = u.userid JOIN ^blobs b ON p.userid = b.userid WHERE ..."

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That's a good approach. Thanks.

Well, I actually create a new function that returns the avatar (HTML form with its image and link) from userid. So, I can display the avatar whenever there is a userid. I can use it in every plugin or widget.

Answer 1

For future reference,

First, the query to get userid must return a flat array, not a nested one. You must use qa_db_read_all_values(qa_db_query_sub()). In the future 1.9 version, the core developers may change this.

To list the items, you can use this to list the first 3 values, the rest can be expressed as "and # others",

list($first, $second, $third) = $userids;

echo $first. ' '. $second.' '.$third. 'have answered this question';

That's why you  need a flat array, not nested.

To return the username, use this Q2A function, which is missing from official DOCS.

• qa_userid_to_handle($first)
• qa_userid_to_handle($second)
• qa_userid_to_handle($third)

Similarly, to display avatars, you do MySQL queries, or exploit the Q2A functions to return avatars from $handle (ie, username).