Looping resultset displays additional br tag

Question

I'm very new to PHP and PDO and was playing around with fetching records from a simple database. I created and managed to successfully do it, but for some odd reason, when I fetchAll() of my records and add a <br> tag in the echo statement, it's adding an extra <br> at a random position in my output. I'm not sure why this is happening. Is this because of the extra white space in my db?

I tried looking online and other topics on SO for a solution; maybe I'm not looking in the right place for my issue.

I have a feeling it's a problem with whitespace and maybe I need to use trim for this?

Here is my code:

// Set all fetch requests as an object by default
$dbo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE, PDO::FETCH_OBJ);

$admin = 'ADMIN';
$adminLive = 'ADMIN-live';
$adminType = 'ADMIN_US_Type';
$customusDomestic = 'US_domestic';
$adminChina = 'China_admin';
$adminIndia = 'India_admin';
$adminCustom = 'ADMIN_custom';
$customusaustinCulver = 'US_Austin_Culver';
$customuschinaTokyo = 'US_China_Tokyo';
$customcorkuaeBayarea = 'Cork_UAE_BayArea';
$customchinashanghaiBeijing = 'China_Shanghai_Beijing';
$adminselfMoves = 'ADMIN_selfmoves';
$adminmilanVienna = 'ADMIN-milan-vienna';
$custombayareaSeattle = 'Bayarea_Seattle_admin';

// Prepare the query
$sql = 'SELECT DISTINCT usergroup
        FROM plus_signup
        WHERE usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?
        AND usergroup != ?';

$stmt = $dbo->prepare($sql);

// Execute the query
$stmt->execute([$admin,$adminLive,$adminType,$customusDomestic,$adminChina,$adminIndia,$adminCustom,$customusaustinCulver,$customuschinaTokyo,$customcorkuaeBayarea,$customchinashanghaiBeijing,$adminselfMoves,$adminmilanVienna,$custombayareaSeattle]);

$usergroups = $stmt->fetchAll();
foreach($usergroups as $locations) {

     // This works fine but my output is adding an extra br in some occurances of the loop
    echo $locations->usergroup . "<br/>";

}

Output in Browser I'm getting

Answer 1

Untested but the logic should ring true:

$dbo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE, PDO::FETCH_NUM);  // fetch as indexed array
$dbo->setAttribute(PDO::NULL_TO_STRING: NULL);                     // nulls to empty strings

$nots = [
    '', 
    $admin,
    $adminLive,
    $adminType,
    $customusDomestic,
    $adminChina,
    $adminIndia,
    $adminCustom,
    $customusaustinCulver,
    $customuschinaTokyo,
    $customcorkuaeBayarea,
    $customchinashanghaiBeijing,
    $adminselfMoves,
    $adminmilanVienna,
    $custombayareaSeattle
];

$placeholders = implode(',', array_fill(0, count($nots), '?'));

$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT usergroup FROM plus_signup WHERE usergroup NOT IN ($placeholders)";
try {
    $stmt = $dbh->prepare($sql);
    $stmt->execute($nots);
    $usergroups = $stmt->fetchAll();
    echo implode('<br>', $usergroups);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();  // not to be shown publicly
}

This should eliminate your empty/null values from being part of the resultset.