Alphabet Navigation Bar

You know those alphabet navigation menus? They look like this:

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

I recently wrote a class to generate and output one of these. It takes two arguments, the name of the field you are are reading from, and the name of the table.

Current Code

{
        public $Chars = array();
        public $Alphabet = array();
       
        public $TableName;
        public $ColumnName;

        public function __construct($table_name, $column_name)
        {
                $this->TableName = $table_name;
                $this->ColumnName = $column_name;
                $this->GetChars();
                $this->PopulateAlphabetArray();
        }

        private function GetChars()
        {
                $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(`{$this->ColumnName}`, 1) as first_letter FROM `{$this->TableName}`";
                $result = mysql_query($sql);
                while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))
                {
                        $this->Chars[] = strtoupper($row[0]);
                }
        }

        private function PopulateAlphabetArray()
        {
                $this->Alphabet = range("a", "z");
        }

        public function CreateAlphabetNavigationBar()
        {
                foreach ($this->Alphabet as $letter)
                {
                        if (in_array(letter, $this->Chars))
                        {
                                $navi[] = ''.$letter.'';
                        }
                        else
                        {
                                $navi[] = $letter;
                        }
                }
                echo implode(" | ", $navi);
        }
} 

Example usage:


mysql_connect('localhost', 'adfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdffasdffasdfasdf', 'safsdfadsdfasdfasdfasfdas');
mysql_select_db('test');

$abc = new AbcBar('links', 'name');

$abc->CreateAlphabetNavigationBar();
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to comment or post in the thread I created for it on www.devnetwork.net/.

PHPDN Forums Thread

Special thanks to JayBird for his suggestions!