Need to display all the Countries List in ASC order With a line break at end of Every Alphabets

Question

Hello all,

I am in need to display all the Countries List in ASC order. But with a line inbetween every end of alphabets. This is by using PHP and SMARTY

Example:

America

Australia

---

Belgium

---

India

---

Like the above i need to display the O/P.

My query is

$str = 'A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,Y,Z';
$let=explode(',', $str, 24);

for($i=0; $i<25; $i++)

{

  $letter = $let[$i][0];

  $select="select *from tbl_country where Country_name like '".$letter."%' ORDER BY Country_name ASC"; 

  $country =$this->ExecuteQuery($select, "select"); 

  $objSmarty->assign("letter",$letter); 

}

$objSmarty->assign("Exe_Wcat",$country);

By executing the above query i am getting all the countires in ORDER. But how should i insert the line break ?

Thanks in Advance...

Fero

Answer 1

When you're looping through the list of countries in your template code, check to see whether the first letter of the country has changed compared to the last loop iteration. If so, output a horizontal line.

To get the first letter, you can use the substring plugin mentioned here:

{$country|substr:0:1}

You can capture the output of that variable:

{capture name=letter}
    {$country|substr:0:1}
{/capture}

... and then check it at the top of your loop against the last capture:

{if $smarty.capture.letter ne ''}
    {if $smarty.capture.letter ne $country|substr:0:1}
        <hr />
    {/if}
{/if}

p.s. I'm not quite sure about the syntax of the inner if statement above, you might have to capture the country letter twice, so you can do something like:

{if $smarty.capture.letter ne $smarty.capture.letter2}

Edit per comment about finding out if it's the last iteration of the loop - from the docs:

{foreach from=$items key=part_id item=prod name=products}
  <a href="#{$part_id}">{$prod}</a>{if $smarty.foreach.products.last}<hr>{else},{/if}
{foreachelse}