Emailing a list of commenters from mysql db, no duplicates

[Juniper747]

I am trying to come up with a way to send a notification email to people associated with a story that was posted. The people to be emailed are:

-the owner of the post (unless the current commenter is the owner)
-everyone else who has ever commented on the post

Also, I need to be careful not to send duplicate emails for anyone who may have posted more than one comment on a given post.

My database comment table is set up with the columns:
comment_id (just a unique id for each comment ever)
post_id (unique id for the posted story)
commenter_id (id of person who is commenting)
commentee_id (id of person who owns the posted story)
comment (the comment itself)
comment_date (date of comment post)

My database members table is basically 2 columns:
id (unique member id)
email (members email)

So far I have:

PHP Code:

$post_id = 25; // id of post
$commentee_id = 9; // id of post owner

$get_all_commenter_ids = mysql_query("SELECT commenter_id FROM comments WHERE post_id='$post_id");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($get_all_commenter_ids)){ 
    $commenter_id = $row["commenter_id"];
}
foreach($commenter_id as $member_to_email) {
    if($commentee_id != $member_to_email) {
                 $get_commenter_email = mysql_query("SELECT email FROM members WHERE id='$member_to_email");
                 while($row = mysql_fetch_array($get_commenter_email )){ 
                     $commenter_email = $row["email"];
                 }
                 // I am not sure what goes next!
        }
}

Please let me know if there is a more elegant way to do this. 


[Len Whistler]

Send an email to everyone who has commented on the thread except for the person below. All ID's have to be unique, no duplicates.

commenter_id (id of person who is commenting)

----

[Juniper747]

Yes, this is what I am trying to do (not manually though!)... any suggestions?

[Len Whistler]

MySQL can return unique records or you can get PHP to sort through the results, I think it's usually better to get MySQL to do most of the work.

PHP Code:

<?php

//0002 has three posts, 0764 has two posts.
$thread_posts_ids = array("0002","0024","0014","0002","0764","8888","0764","4321","0002","7632");
$thread_posts_unique_ids = array_unique($thread_posts_ids);

foreach ($thread_posts_unique_ids as $value){
echo "Send email to: $value<br>";
}
?>

Output

Send email to: 0002
Send email to: 0024
Send email to: 0014
Send email to: 0764
Send email to: 8888
Send email to: 4321
Send email to: 7632

[Keleth]

SELECT DISTINCT commenter_id FROM comments WHERE post_id=$post_id

Remember that you don't need and shouldn't have quotes around a number, if its being compared to a numeric type.