Question

I think this is really simple, but I can’t get my head around it.

I would like to achieve something like this:
Get all names from database.
Get first letter for each name.
Show all 26 Alphabet characters + numbers:
A B C D E F etc…0-9

And only put a link on the characters, which are the first letter of a username. In other words something like this:

Usernames from database-> Moonwalker, Tester, Admin, Tutorial, Arial

All characters are visible:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S
T U V W X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

but only the letters that have the same first letter as usernames are linked to something:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S
T U V W X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I know it’s possible, but I have no idea how to achieve this.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This is how you can get the first letter:

SELECT LEFT(`name`, 1) AS first_letter
  FROM users

This is how you can find users using first letter (with first B):

SELECT `name`
  FROM users
 WHERE `name` LIKE 'B%'

This is how you can get the list of first letters, that exist in database (with optional count of occurrences):

  SELECT LEFT(`name`, 1) AS first_letter,
         COUNT(*) AS occurrences
    FROM users
GROUP BY first_letter