Using an Alphabet List

danielhalawi

I have a music website, and I want user to be able to find their favorite artist by name.
I want alphabet list, ie:

a | b | c .... and so on

When the user clicks on for example b the php page searches the mysql database in the field artisitinfo for the first letter, and all the entries where to first letter is b are shown
Is the possible?

geat

Yeah - use the like search:

select * from music where artistinfo like 'a%'

Retireves all rows from the music table where artistinfo starts with a.

% is the wildcard character.

bastien

create each letter as a link to the search page using something like

then in the search page the sql looks like

$name=$_GET['id']; //pull the letter from the link

$sql="select * from mytable where artist_name like '$name%'";

$result=mysql_query($sql);

//blah blah blah

hth

jpmoriarty

after messing around trying to get this to work, i came up with this:

$alpha = 65;

while($alpha <= 90)
{
  if ($alpha==90)
    echo   echo " ".chr($alpha);
  else
    echo " ".chr($alpha)." | ";
  $alpha++;
}

as a handy "alphabet generating" tool ( I could never get alphabetical loops to stop at the right place!). You may find that handy...

danielhalawi

Originally posted by bastien
create each letter as a link to the search page using something like

<a href=search.php?id='A'>A</a>

then in the search page the sql looks like

$name=$_GET['id']; //pull the letter from the link

$sql="select * from mytable where artist_name like '$name%'";

$result=mysql_query($sql);

//blah blah blah

hth

This works great, however, when I have fields that are empty in artistinfo, the word artistinfo appears in a.
Is there a way of excluding the word artistinfo from the search?

bastien

but if you're getting something unexpected you can code to avoid blank entries in the results table by merely skipping them

if is_null($row[1]) {
echo "no data"
}else{
echo $row[1];
}

if you post some of your code I can give a more concrete example

hth

danielhalawi

When I created the feild in the mysql database, I already had entries, the entries automatically added artistinfo to the field.
this is the whole search code.

$name=$_GET['id']; //pull the letter from the link 
$sql="select * from vmplay where artistinfo like '$name%'"; 
$XX = "Sorry, no artist is currently under this letter."; 
$result=mysql_query($sql); 
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$ar = $row["artistinfo"]; 
echo "<span class=\"copy\"><a href=musictoday?id=".$row['id'].">$ar</a></span><BR>"; 
} 
if (!$ar)  

{ 
print ("$XX"); 
}

I want the search to ignore the fields that have the word artistinfo in the artistinfo feild.

bastien

value from the db table...use phpmyadmin or whatever the tool you have and just clear the values

update vmplay set artistinfo = null where artistinfo='artistinfo'

hth