sort by first letter

robsgaming

Quick question, I run a gaming site with a lot of games... the way to navigate thru the game titles sucks right now

I want to run a query that will select all the titles based on a system, then display letters of the alphabet for only the games in the db that begin with that letter

for instance say i have Mario, Super Mario, Mario world, and Time travel as games..

all i want displayed is

Browse by alpha: M S T

then they click a letter and it will show games that begin with that letter

diego25

You can do something like this:

(assuming your database table is "games", and the field is "gameName")

SELECT DISTINCT SUBSTRING(gameName, 1, 1) FROM games ORDER BY gameName

Diego

robsgaming

how do i display the results of that query?

this isn't working:

<?

$db = mysql_connect("xxx", "xxx", "xxx");
mysql_select_db("robsgaming",$db);

$query = "SELECT DISTINCT SUBSTRING(gametitle, 1, 1) FROM gamedata WHERE system = '$system' ORDER BY gametitle";
$result = MYSQL_QUERY($query);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array ($result)) { 
extract($row);

echo "$gametitle";

}

?>

It just gives me a blank page... now if i put a something infront of $gametitle that isn't a variable it will display whatever i put there the number of times a row was returned or whatever...

diego25

When dealing with databases, it is sometimes helpful to use print_r() to see what fields $row actually contains.

But anyway, to solve your problem, change your query (the beginning part) to this:

SELECT DISTINCT SUBSTRING(gametitle, 1, 1) FROM gamedata AS gametitle

so now when you do extract($row), you're going to get a $gametitle variable.

Diego