build a query

I have a table with columns, itemid, itemname, price1, price2, price3, price4, price5, price6, price7, etc. These are different prices from different distributors.
I am displaying these records in a table thru php.
What I want is , get 3 lowest distributor prices.
Forexample,
item1 ->
lowest from price1, price2,price3, price4.....
second lowest from price1, price2, price3, price4....
third lowest from price1, price2, price3, price4....

Can anyone give an idea ?

 

The constructions of the tables are "wrong" - what you should have is two tables, one for itemid, itemname and a second for prices with id, itemid and price and then have several entries in this for each item.
That way you will get something like
SELECT t1.*,t2.* FROM items t1 LEFT JOIN itemprices t2 ON t1.itemid = t2.itemid ORDER BY price

 

i cannot change the table structure now as it is coming from a scraper.
I have one item and multiple price columns.
with this structure is it possible to get lowest prices across columns for each row ??

 

All you need is MySQL least() function

 

thanks. I think this might work, I will try it out. I have never used this function so will try it out.