Separating a list of entries by the first letter in a given field

I'm trying to list a series of entries by the first letter of the entry title.

How would I do this, and b, separate each letter per each of the Alphabet.

Thanks

Let's say I have two titles:

Much Ado About Nothing
The Tempest

I'd need to separate the titles according to the first letter:

//
K
L
M - Much Ado About Nothing
N
//
S
T The Tempest
U
V

etc.

EDIT: This is the array I have, and I need to select the title from it:

Array
(
[0] => Array
    (
        [id] 开发者_StackOverflow中文版=> 1
        [title] => Test Article
        [author] => Shamil
        [date] => 1309039548
        [summary] => Summary of test article
        [content] => 

Technical article Content.


        [category] => technical
        [published] => 0
    )

)

---

Assuming all these entries comes in an array, and the titles are capitalized, you can do the following:

$entries = array(...); // the original entries
sort($entries);

$alphabetized = array();
foreach (range('A', 'Z') as $letter) {
    $alphabetized[$letter] = array();
}

foreach ($entries as $entry) {
    array_unshift($alphabetized[$entry[0]], $entry);
}

The only problem with this algorithm is that it will alphabetize something like "The Matrix" under T instead of M. But at least this is a start.

Update:
Here's code I made to handle "The" and "A":

<?php
$entries = array(
    array('title' => 'Much Ado About Nothing'),
    array('title' => 'Star Wars'),
    array('title' => 'The Tempest'),
    array('title' => 'A Wrinkle In Time'),
    array('title' => 'Star Trek'),
    array('title' => 'The'),
    array('title' => 'A')
);

function shamil_title_compare($a, $b) {
    return strcasecmp($a['title'], $b['title']);
}

usort($entries, 'shamil_title_compare');

$alphabetized = array();
foreach (range('A', 'Z') as $letter) {
    $alphabetized[$letter] = array();
}

foreach ($entries as $entry) {
    $title = $entry['title'];
    $firstWord = strtok($title, ' ');
    if (!in_array($firstWord, array('The', 'A'))) {
        $alphabetized[$firstWord[0]][] = $entry;
    } else {
        $nextWord = strtok(' ');
        if ($nextWord !== false) {
            $alphabetized[$nextWord[0]][] = $entry;
        } else {
            $alphabetized[$firstWord[0]][] = $entry;
        }
    }
}

Update 2 I've updated my code to output the alphabetized list into an html unordered list:

<?php
$entries = array(
    array('title' => 'Much Ado About Nothing'),
    array('title' => 'Star Wars'),
    array('title' => 'A Quantum of Solace'),
    array('title' => 'The Tempest'),
    array('title' => 'Cat Attack'),
    array('title' => 'A Wrinkle In Time'),
    array('title' => 'Star Trek'),
    array('title' => 'The Cat'),
    array('title' => 'Wicked Witch of the West'),
);

// Build a copy of the original, but strip "The" and "A", and lowercase it.
$sort = array();
foreach ($entries as $index => $array)
{
    $title = strtoupper($array['title']);
    list($head, $tail) = explode(' ', $title, 2);

    if (($head !== 'A') and ($head !== 'THE'))
    {
        $sort[] = $title;
    }
    else if ($tail != '')
    {
        $sort[] = $tail;
    }
    else
    {
        $sort[] = $head;
    }
}

array_multisort($sort, SORT_ASC, SORT_STRING, $entries);

$alphabetized = array();
foreach (range('A', 'Z') as $letter)
{
    $alphabetized[$letter] = array();
}

foreach ($sort as $index => $title)
{
    $letter = $title[0];
    $alphabetized[$letter][] = $entries[$index];
}

// Output as html
foreach ($alphabetized as $letter => $entries)
{
    echo "<h3>{$letter}</h3>", PHP_EOL,
        "<ul>", PHP_EOL;
    foreach ($entries as $entry)
    {
        echo "<li>{$entry['title']}</li>", PHP_EOL;
    }
    echo "</ul>", PHP_EOL;
}