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Looking at frameworks I came across Codeigniter. I was wondering what the proper process would be to build the html output for results from the db before passing it to the view. Meaning I create a model to fetch rows from the db, load the model in the controller, before passing the results to the view I want to build the view using the results instead of looping through the results and displaying it in the view itself. If I were to do that would I create a private function in the controller to do that? Or would I do that in the model or should I just do that in the view?

I just feel this would be cleaner to do than write all the code in the view to display the results so if there were changes to the display of the results or display it on another page I can just re-use the display function instead of copying and pasting the code from the view.

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I would recommend putting view specific code in, well ... the views.

You might think it would make it cleaner because it makes your view look tidy, but honestly once you have the view output coming from all directions, it could get very complex, very fast.

And in my experience, I hardly ever have a single, ever consistant, representation for a returned database object.

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Agree with both answers so far. Best option is in the view - Your display logic should be in the view - so, some code must be there.
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The view is the information that is being presented to a user. That's where you should be looping through your results.

Have a look at http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/overview/mvc.html for more an overview of what the models, controllers and views are responsible for.

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@Francois Deschenes I read that and I guess my confusion is that I thought the view is the end result of what the user sees and the controller is the inbetween for the model and view and can generate the code to pass onto the view and the view simply echoes out the variables from the controller. In this case in my OP I thought that is what I would be doing, generating the data and pass it to the view.
@John - You are generating the data in the controller using the model and passing the data to the view to be rendered. If that includes an array then the view should include the foreach loop.
@Francois Deschenes So quick question then, in the model can I just pass back the results from back to the controller then to the view to loop through them? Or do I have to first loop through the results via the model and assign it to an array, then pass that array into the view from the controller for the for each loop? I was watching a tutorial of them putting the results into an array in the model, then passing it back to controller then to the view and then looping through the results, seemed like a redundant process.
@John - There's no need to loop through anything in the controller. If you're pulling from more than 1 model (or more than once from the same model), you'll want to create an array that contains all of the data you want to pass to the view when you load it. The controller's job is to retrieve and update data, the model's is to define the data, and the view's is to displays it.
@Francois Deschenes What I meant is in the controller when I call a model and run a function that returns rows inside the model can I just return the results back to the controller, assign those results to an array and pass it to the view and loop in the view?
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I just feel this would be cleaner to do than write all the code in the view to display the results so if there were changes to the display of the results or display it on another page I can just re-use the display function instead of copying and pasting the code from the view.

No need to do that at all, simply write your display logic into a view file as mentioned, and load the same view file for each instance you want to display the results the same way.

This is exactly what the view layer is for: Presentation. Remember that you don't need a separate view for every page. Likewise, you can make several views for the same data, so you can switch between them (or even let your users switch between them).

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