Sorting mysql results alphabetically

Anon

I want to sort mysql alphabetically but a bit different let me explain:

i have a font's site and i want to make categories like A|B|C|D|E ... and i want to sort all fonts from a into A category... like this

there's any way i can do that?? thxs

jordan

Well, say you have all of your fonts in table 'fonts' and their names are stored in column 'name'. One way to get, say, all the fonts starting with the letter 'a' and then sort them alphabetically would be this:

SELECT * FROM fonts WHERE LOWER(SUBSTRING(name,1,1)) = 'a';

The SUBSTRING() function returns the first letter of the value in column 'name' (MySQL's SUBSTRING() works differently from PHP's substr() in that the first character has index 1 rather than 0). The LOWER() function makes it lowercase, just in case you have fonts whose names start with both uppercase and lowercase letters.

jordan

Oh, I neglected one thing: to order the fonts alphabetically within the (in my example, starting-with-'a') subcategory, you should use ORDER BY, so your query would actually be this:

SELECT * FROM fonts WHERE LOWER(SUBSTRING(name,1,1)) = 'a' ORDER BY name;

Anon

thxs Jordan 😃

Jordan wrote:

Oh, I neglected one thing: to order the fonts alphabetically within the (in my example, starting-with-'a') subcategory, you should use ORDER BY, so your query would actually be this:

SELECT * FROM fonts WHERE LOWER(SUBSTRING(name,1,1)) = 'a' ORDER BY name;