Group records in CakePHP based on first letter? - cakephp

Question

I'm wanting to fetch and group records from a database table by the first letter. So for example:
A
Alfred
B
Brian
C
Christopher
...
Ideally, I'd like my data structure to come out as follows:
Array
(
[A] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[Person] => Array
(
[id] => 12
[name] => Alfred
)
)
)
)
I could do this with a raw MySQL query, but not sure if CakePHP supports this out of the box. I'm just literally wanting records grouped so I can iterate over them and create an unordered list for each letter:
<h2>A</h2>
<ul>
<li>Alfred</li>
</ul>
<h2>B</h2>
<ul>
<li>Brian</li>
</ul>
<h2>C</h2>
<ul>
<li>Christopher</li>
</ul>
...

Answer 1

What i would do is: order them by name and then sort them in a loop:
$people = $this->Person->find('all', array(
'order' => 'Person.name ASC'
));
And then you could do:
$letter = '';
foreach($people as $person) {
$firstLetter = strtolower(substr($person['Person']['name'], 0, 1));
if ($firstLetter !== $letter) {
$letter = $firstLetter;
}
$_people[$letter][] = $person;
}
$people = $_people;
Or just do it directly in the view so you don't need to loop it twice:
<ul>
<?php $letter = 'first'; ?>
<?php foreach ($people as $person) : ?>
<?php $firstLetter = strtolower(substr($person['Person']['name'], 0, 1)); ?>
<?php if ($firstLetter !== $letter) : ?>
<?php if ($letter !== 'first') : ?>
</ul></li>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php $letter = $firstLetter; ?>
<li><h2><?php echo $firstLetter; ?></h2><ul>
<?php endif; ?>
<li><?php echo $person['Person']['name']; ?></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul></li></ul>
I wouldn't know how to get this structure just by using a find call (except for making 26 calls or creating a db table containing all letters) and I don't see why that would be neccesairy.
Hope that helps! (ps code isn't tested... but you get the point. should there be any typos)

Answer 2

Try this:
$peoplebyletter = array();
foreach($people as $person){
$peoplebyletter[strtolower(substr($person['Person']['name'], 0, 1))][] = $person;
}
debug($peoplebyletter);
Not tested. Let me know if it works.