select statement i think

slimjim

Can anyone tell me how to do this.

Lets say i have a table with categoryid,catname as the fields

categoryid is auto_increment
and in catname are names of the catgorys

example :
1 autoparts
2 baseballs
3 wood
4 paper

Now what i want to do it list on a page just a the first letter of each catname like such and make each a link to the categorie page

A B C D E
F G H I J
K L M N O

Well you get the idea on that...

Currently this is what i have and it list them like this
autoparts
baseballs
wood
paper

<?
			$sql="select * from junkcategory order by catname ASC";
	        $res=mysql_query($sql);
			while($obj=mysql_fetch_object($res))
			{
			$groupname=$obj->catname;
			$cid=$obj->categoryid;
			if($cid==$catid)$img="<img src='images/z_FOLDER02a.gif'>";else $img="<img src='images/z_FOLDER02.gif'>";
			?>
            <tr valign="middle"> 
              <td width="4%" height="25" align="left" >&nbsp;</td>
              <td height="25" align="left" class="normal">
			  <? print "$img&nbsp;<a href='index.php?catid=$cid'><b>$groupname</b></a> (".getNumjunk($cid).")";?>
				</td>
            </tr>
			<?
			}
			?>

planetsim

try and SQL Statement like this

SELECT SUBSTRING(catname,1,1) 
FROM mytable

That will have all the catname's as a single character

slimjim

now it says this

Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource

Here is what the code looked like with that edit.

<?
			$sql="SELECT SUBSTRING(catname,1,1) FROM jinkcategory";
	        $res=mysql_query($sql);
			while($obj=mysql_fetch_object($res))
			{
			$groupname=$obj->catname;
			$cid=$obj->categoryid;
			if($cid==$catid)$img="<img src='images/z_FOLDER02a.gif'>";else $img="<img src='images/z_FOLDER02.gif'>";
			?>
            <tr valign="middle"> 
              <td width="4%" height="25" align="left" >&nbsp;</td>
              <td height="25" align="left" class="normal">
			  <? print "$img&nbsp;<a href='index.php?catid=$cid'><b>$groupname</b></a> (".getNumjunk($cid).")";?>
				</td>
            </tr>
			<?
			}
			?>

slimjim

error says it is from this function, do i need to change something on that too ?

function getNumjunk($catid)
{
	$sql="select * from table where categoryid=$catid";
	$res=mysql_query($sql);
	return mysql_num_rows($res);
}