reorder sql query

Posted on 16th Feb 2014 by admin

ok so i have this very simple code:
Code: $query = "SELECT search_keywords, COUNT(search_keywords) AS counter FROM phpbb_popsearch GROUP BY search_keywords ORDER BY counter DESC limit 5";
$res = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($res)) {
$term = $row["search_keywords"];
echo $term;
}

phpbb_popsearch is a table where i put the last search terms used in my forum search engine

this code will group together the same terms and list the 5 most popular terms

my problem is that the results will be ordered by "counter" which is the number of time a term has been found.

I want to get the 5 most popular results AND THEN, AFTER, list the results alphabetically

if i sort the results alphabetically right in the sql query (replacing "ORDER BY counter" by "ORDER BY search_keywords") it will not work correctly because it will not get the 5 most popular terms but just the 5 first terms, alphabetically sorting them and ignoring the number of times the term has been found

thanks for help

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