Organinizing a query

[knueven7]

I have a mysql table with a field of lastnames in it. I have written a query that retrieves all of the lastnames and limits them to groups of 50. This gives me 5 pages of lastnames which are accessed by links labeled 1-2-3-4-5. This isn't the easiest way to find one of the lastnames if you're on the webpage. I would rather limit the query to all lastnames that have first letters from a - d. That would allow me to replace my numbered links on the webpage with a-d, e-h, etc... Can someone give me an idea how to write a query that could do this?

Thanks.

-bk

[devinemke]

SELECT * FROM table WHERE last_name LIKE 'a%'
SELECT * FROM table WHERE last_name LIKE 'b%'
SELECT * FROM table WHERE last_name LIKE 'c%'
etc...

[mrhappiness]

SELECT *
FROM tablename
WHERE last_name REGEXP '^[A-D]'

hth

[AstroTeg]

I like devinemke's approach. Maybe tweak it a little to have it all in one query:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE last_name LIKE 'a%' or last_name LIKE 'b%' or last_name LIKE 'c%' (etc)

Using regular expressions definitey makes the query shorter and easier to code. But my concern would be along the lines of what kind of query performance hit do you take for it and do you have any intentions of ever moving your data to another database engine? In this example, I don't think the regular expression will tax the database much if any in this example (but might be worth experimenting with).