a to z links directory question

[martincrumlish]

Hi,

i am about to put together an app that will list the alphabet at the top of the page and when a user clicks on 'a', all the links beginning with a are displayed.

Does anyone know the best way to go about doing this? I need to make it so that the user has an admin area where they enter a link. i could have an alphabet dropdown which categorises the links by user definition but I would rather have PHP read the first letter and store it accordingly. I was thinking of having a letter id column called cat which stores a number for each letter of the alphabet

if(first letter is a){
   $cat = 1;
   }

....

if(first letter is z){
    $cat = 26;
}

Then, when they click on the letter link it will be like this: <a href="link.php?cat=1">a</a> | <a href="link.php?cat=2">b</a> | .... etc.

basically, i just need someone to help me with making PHP automatically detect the first letter and then assign a variable a corresponding numeric value. i am sure this is simple enough....

Thanks in advance,
Martin

[RedDragon]

my code would only work if the catid for a would be 0, for b it would be 1, for c 2

$y = 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($x=0;$x<sizeof($y);$x++) {
echo "<a href=\"script.php?category=$x\">$y[$x]</a>&nbsp;";
}

[mickro]

Hi Martin,

You could just get the first letter by doing:

$first_letter = substr($word,0,1);

then enter that into a letter column.

alternatively you could get the first letter with your select statement:

<a href="link.php?cat=a">a</a>

$sql = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE word LIKE '%$cat'";

HTH

Mike

[martincrumlish]

Thanks, the first answer was what i was looking for.