MySQL search first letter

PMWD · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:26

Is it possible to get MySQL and PHP to basically say "SELECT * FROM table WHERE firstletter of title='$letter'" ?

PiKe · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:27

SELECT *
FROM `users`
WHERE `name` LIKE 's%'

the % is the wildcard.

PMWD · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:28

Ahh genius I'll try that, thanks PiKe

PMWD · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:29

Oh another one, say I wanted to find everything that started with a numeric?

PiKe · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:29

PMWD said:
Oh another one, say I wanted to find everything that started with a numeric?

Is the field still a string? If so, simply 1% would do.

PMWD · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:36

So that'll pull any number so if it's "3.1 update" it'll work?

Is there any way of doing it so that it pulls anything that's not a letter of the alphabet instead? Just in case we gets brackets etc?

PiKe · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:40

PMWD said:
So that'll pull any number so if it's "3.1 update" it'll work?

Is there any way of doing it so that it pulls anything that's not a letter of the alphabet instead? Just in case we gets brackets etc?

Don't know about searching for non-alphanumberic characters.

Using 1% would return anything starting with 1...

1111
1246
100000
1
12

PMWD · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:51

Ahh right so I'd need to spool through 0-9? No probs.

Andre · 27 Oct 2009 at 15:57

You could try LIKE '[0-9]%' - not sure whether MySQL supports regular expressions?

dangerstat · 27 Oct 2009 at 18:11

Andre said:
You could try LIKE '[0-9]%' - not sure whether MySQL supports regular expressions?

MySQL does support regular expressions:

SELECT FROM users WHERE username regexp 'regular expression here'

HTH

Dangerstat

PMWD · 1 Nov 2009 at 15:09

Cheers fella, ended up using

PHP:

REGEXP '^[[:digit:]]'

dangerstat · 1 Nov 2009 at 15:26

PMWD said:
Cheers fella, ended up using

PHP:

REGEXP '^[[:digit:]]'

No problem, glad to hear you got it working

CaptainComedy · 1 Nov 2009 at 16:50

%1% would pull anything with a 1 in it.