Search [alphabetically, first letter] a | b | c | d | e.. ?
 

I'm new to the SQL searching thing and I've been trying to figure out a way to allow a user search via the first letter on a certain table, such as "title" or "topic" or something.


So by a user clicking a or b or c or d.. so on and so forth..

The result would bring back and alphabetical order of topics with -just- that letter (such as the example below).

If user clicks A, result is:

alien
alligator
ant
art
asp

If user clicks B, result is:

beast
bite
brake
butter

..

I'm assuming to get the function to go alphabetical, it'd be GROUP BY or ORDER BY with an ASC or DESC, but the searching via a first letter is kind of killing me. ;)

[sql]WHERE like 'a%'[/sql]

That would get all entries where the title column starts with an 'a'.

if you want to ignore cases it's

[sql]WHERE UCASE(fieldname) LIKE 'A%'[/sql]

It normally seems to ignore the case anyway, at least on 4.0.15, I just tried and got A and a returned. Although normally I'd put a case check in to be sure ;)

Wow. Thanks for the speedy replies. :)

I'll definitely give it a shot.

Thankies thankies!

hmm, it didn't ignore cases when i checked it lasttime, and i know other DB's like DB2 don't ignore it.

bah, maybe it's just a setting, which is changeable ;)