Displaying non-alphabet fields

Anon

i have a program that displays a list of my music collection alphabetically, and it puts line breaks inbetween the a's, b's, c's and so on. one problem i have is i cant figure out how to display non-alphabet fields. for example, the band named "500 Years". Anyone have any ideas?

here's my code:

$letters = array('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z');

for ($i = 0; $i < count($letters); $i++) {
$letter = $letters[$i] . "%";

// query table for each letter

$list = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM music WHERE genre LIKE '$genre' AND artist LIKE '$letter' ORDER BY artist, title", $link_id);
	$list_count = mysql_num_rows($list);

  // display music starting with that letter

  while ($rows = mysql_fetch_array($list)) {
  	echo("<b>" . $rows["artist"] . "</b> - " . $rows["title"] . "\n<br>\n");
  } 

  // line break after each letter section

  if ($list_count > 1) echo("<br>\n");
}

Anon

one more thing, is there any way to access the alphabet in PHP without making an array with each letter?

Anon

For your first question; why not just include digits in your $letters array as well?

Since you're only reading this array, you can replace it with a string without affecting any of the rest of your code:

$letters="0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";

For your second question, you can replace $letters[$i] (where $lettes is extended as above to include digits) by

base_convert($i,10,36);

But I'd operate slightly differently. I'd do just one query, sorted by artist and title, and leave out the artist LIKE bit.

Then while I loop through the result set I'd do this:
{
$firstletter=substr($rows['artist'],0,1);
$groupedrows[strtoupper($firstletter)][]=
array('artist' => $rows['artist'],
'title' => $rows['title']);
}

Then I'm finished with the result set.

I can go

count($groupedrows['A']) would be the number of matches to an artist with a name beginning with 'A'; and

foreach($groupedrows['A'] as $row) will start a loop through this array, where $row['artist'] is the artist and $row['title'] is the title.

And of course you can do

foreach($groupedrows as $letter=>$rows)
{
foreach($rows as $row)
{ List the details for each $row for each $letter in turn
}
}

But that's just a sketch of how I'd do something like this. It's obviously no good if the database is especially big.

Anon

Grumbler wrote:

$letters="0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";

Yea, I thought of that. However, that would seperate "1" and "2" like "c" and "d" and that's not what I want. I'm looking to group all the numerical titles together, as if they are all one. See what I mean?

Anon

Well, with the alternative implementation I gave this could be achieved; after reading in all the rows do:

$groupedrows['digit'] = array_merge(
$groupedrows['0'], $groupedrows['1'],
$groupedrows['2'], $groupedrows['3'],
$groupedrows['4'], $groupedrows['5'],
$groupedrows['6'], $groupedrows['7'],
$groupedrows['8'], $groupedrows['9']);

and then unset() $groupedrows['0'], etc.

A WHERE clause in a MySQL query could be:

"48<=ASCII(artist) AND ASCII(artist)<=57"