Jason Soza wrote: > I have a 'name' field in a MySQL table that contains people's first and > last names, i.e. "John Smith" - but some people may choose not to > include their last name, so they're just "John" in the table, or they > may choose to include themselves and someone else, but not the last > name, "John and Jane". > > I'm thinking the easiest way to sort by last name, which is what I want > to do, is to just go into MySQL and make 'first_name' and 'last_name' > fields, but if there's a way to do this with PHP that'd be great, so > then I wouldn't have to mess with the table and data. > > Anyhow, I've looked up sort() and asort() in the PHP manual, but I'm > not sure how I'd go about this. I assume I'd use some kind of function > to read the 'name' field to the first space, take what it finds after > the space and put it into an array, then have some if/else statement to > deal with the lack of a space or the presence of multiple spaces, then > use sort() on that array. > > Just looking for some guidance, maybe a specific function or bit of > code. Anything that'd help. Or if this would be more easily addressed > by reconfiguring my MySQL table, just let me know. > > Thanks, > Jason Soza >
via MySQL you can search by and order/sort by a substring'ed result. Of course, when someone only puts one name or they enter multiple first names, it doesn't work quite the way it's supposed to. For what i do, the following query returns the first letter of the last name in alphabetical order. SELECT substring(substring_index(fullname,' ',-1),1,1) FROM user GROUP BY substring(substring_index(fullname,' ',-1),1,1) ORDER by substring_index(fullname,' ',-1) ASC There is a demo at http://www.defconzero.com/user.php?op=view Hope that provides some insight. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
