Re: Grouping

On Thu, January 19, 2006 12:19 pm, Jeffrey Pearson wrote: > OK. I know I did this a LONG time ago but I don't remember how I did > it. Thus, my post. > > I have a list of last names from a MySQL database. I need to display > them grouped by the first letter of their last names and insert a > separator on display. Similar to a phone book. So it looks like; It might be slightly more clear to have MySQL get the initial letter, rather than PHP... //Also note use of 'upper' in case you have mixed case names. // You presumably want all caps for alpha section names $query = "select upper(substring(name, 0, 1)), name from names order by name"; //next line is bad code, for simplicity of example: $names = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error()); $last_letter = 'an extremely unlikely single character'; while (list($letter, $name) = mysql_fetch_row($names)){ if ($letter != $last_letter) echo $letter, "<hr />\n"; echo $name, "<br />\n"; } As an exercise for the reader, you should consider lumping all non A-Z characters together, rather than individually. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm