[mapserver-users] Filtering Shapefile attributes in PHP?

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

Hi all,

I have a number of ways I can take a Shapefile's
attribute table and pull items into PHP, either by
using PHP/Mapscript to query each shape's attributes
or by using the native PHP DBF functions (which won't
get me the spatial data, but I can work around that).

The problem is that the shapefile DBF can return multiple
records and donuts, while I just want each distinct result.
In most instances, this returns too many records to be
manageable as an array in PHP.

Even if I could get the query to return the results in
alphabetical order, I could filter the results as I send
them to the web browser.

This would be easy with SQL, but I can't find anything like
it for DBFs.

Ideas?

Antti