getting alphabetical list

[Anon]

Ok what i'm doing is querying mysql and i want to then display a list of letters that i can sort by. Like right now i can browse the results by "A | B | C | D |.... |Y|Z" But i only want the letters that match up with the first letter of items in the query to show up. ex. if the query returns "strawberry, blueberry, bannana, apple, grape" I only want the letters " A | B | G | S" to print out. i know i can do a cross reference on the query and store the first letter of every item to an array and then sort the array.

I was wondering if there was perhaps a more effecient way to do this either in php or in the mysql query since the page will be viewed a lot. Thanks

[Anon]

Try a query that looks like:

select LEFT(textvalue, 1) FROM test_table GROUP BY LEFT(textvalue, 1) ORDER BY LEFT(textvalue, 1);

Where textvalue is the name of the column you need the letter from and test_table is the name of the table. I know this works with the latest 3.23, dunno about 3.22 (should upgrade anyway though). Hope that helps.

Chris King