Sorting Data By It's First Letter

[Grabeorama]

Is there a way of retrieving data from a table, but only sorting by it's first letter?For example if I wanted to pull all entries for the column 'Names' that started with the letter A, then on a separate occasion sort them by the letter B etc.

Edited March 13, 2010 by Grabeorama

[justsomeguy]

You can use any of the string functions in MySQL to compare or transform the fields.http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/string-functions.html

[Grabeorama]

So would it be something like this:$sql = "SELECT * FROM blog WHERE Name = `SUBSTR('A',1)`";mysql_query($sql);

[justsomeguy]

SELECT * FROM blog WHERE SUBSTR(Name, 1) = 'A'It would probably be better to use the LEFT function though, that returns a certain number of characters from the left side. That sounds like exactly what you need, so the database will probably run that faster.

[Grabeorama]

Okay thanks I'll try that now.EDIT: Thanks that works

Edited March 13, 2010 by Grabeorama