Sorting by first letter [newbie]

Anon

I am making a site and it has a band database that will allow bands to add their band to the database.
There will be a navigation that is A-Z 0-9 and when some one clicks on say "M" I want it to show all bands that start with the letter M.
My database has a column called "BandName"
I have it where the url will be

bandList.php?Letter=M
(or what ever letter they choose) and that will take them to the bandList.php page (of course)
Now I have connected to my database and retrieved all data from my database
$DataQuery ="SELECT * FROM $TableName";
Now how do I say "Only display BandNames that start with $Letter"?

Thanks in advance! 🙂

Anon

Here\'s an idea if you hadn\'t thought of it already. To get this result easily. Make a new column in the table. Name it \"letter\" or something similar. Make the type \"char\". Next extract the first letter from the name you inserted into the database and put it into the column \"letter\". For instance.

Say I wanted the name of the people who start with the letter a.
(Example. The first letter in the name Alex is a) So I put a in the letter column.

--Information in database--
id name letter
1 Alex a
2 Ashley a
3 Adam a
4 Chris c
5 Daniel d
--INformation in database--

Now when I want to display the names of the people whose name starts with \"a\" I use this code.

$query = \"select name from people where letter = \'a\'\";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(\"Failure to select data.\");
while(list($name) = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
print(\"$name<br>\");
}

And voila the names will print.

--Result of page--
Alex
Ashley
Adam
--Result of page--

I did this kinda quick so you\'re going to have to tweak anything I missed. Hope this helps.

Anon

This forum mistakenly put slashes before quotes like this \' or \" make sure you don't insert it in like that, take the slash out.

Anon

and then
sort($name);
to order the returned array alphabetically (eg. aardvark, abacus, abracadabra)

--
stripslashes($reply)

Anon

mysql,
can you do a:

select * from tablename where fieldname like '$sort%' order by fieldname

that should match anything that begins with $sort right? not 4 sure, dont want to test it for you.

Anon

also if you want to check the first letter of a string you can do:

$string[0]

strangly enough, this will return the first letter.

so:

if($stringname[0]=="a"){

Anon

I figured it out late last night... using the following code..

SELECT * FROM $TableName WHERE BandName LIKE '$Letter%'

Anon

I wouldn't call it strange. If I remember correctly my PHP book said that strings are "in fact arrays" or something similar. I'm not sure exactly what it said, oh well.

I left that part out because I didn't know if Torrey was inserting the band names manually or getting them from form submitions.

So, Torrey if you are getting the band names from forms make sure to incorporate what pyroxpro.com added.