Group PHP results on first letter of name

Question

I have a query which gets all records ordered by last_name. Now I would like to create a loop that groups these results by the first letter of the last name and display the

Answer 1

Yes you can achive this using MySql itself

In my case brand_name going to be list out as you expected.

Example :

SELECT id, upper(SUBSTR(brand_name, 1, 1))  AS alpha FROM products WHERE  brand_name != ''  group by alpha
UNION
SELECT id, upper(SUBSTR(brand_name, 1, 1))  AS alpha FROM products WHERE  brand_name != '' order by brand_name COLLATE NOCASE

Result :

    A
    A Card
    A Cef
    A Cef O
    B
    Bacticef Tab
    Bacticin
    Bactidrox
    Bactidrox Kid
    ........

Hope it will help someone.