detect first letter of a word

[jwk811]

i have a list of words and they will be categorized by the first letter.. like the person will click a or b or c etc. and all the words with that letter will come up.. for the first part i will need to know how to be able to see what the first letter of the word is so i can do that.. next i will need to figure out how i can take only the words starting with that letter from the database to be displayed.. i need help with both but either will be great! thanks for any help on this!

[mlin]

Well you can always get the 1st letter of a string just like you'd get the 1st element of an array:
$a = "string";

echo $a[0];

that would output s

but to search for all records that start with a particular letter you could use a like in your query:

select * from table_name where column like 'a%'

that should get all the records from column that start with a

[doni49]

[code]
<?php
$test = "my dog";
$test2 = strtoupper(substr($test, 0, 1)) . substr($test,1);
?>
[/code]

[NovaHaCker]

[quote author=mlin link=topic=119009.msg486802#msg486802 date=1166388321]
select * from table_name where column like 'a%'
[/quote]

I agree, best to solve as many data issues at the sql script instead of sorting this out in PHP, so the above SQL query would be correct.