Order Alphabetically and Display By Group

Question

I'm trying to display a list of titles from my database in alphabetical order and also in blocks.

I want to output the letter and then include all titles that start with that letter. For example:

• A
  • Apple
  • anotherthing
• B
  • Bob

I know that I can order my results using .order('title'), but I'm not sure what the best way to write the display code is?

Answer 1

titles.group_by {|word| word[0].upcase }

So, then if:

titles = ['Apple', 'anothersomething', 'Bob']

Then:

grouped_titles = titles.group_by {|word| word[0].upcase }
 => {"A"=>["Apple", "anothersomething"], "B"=>["Bob"]} 

In order to be certain about the ordering, you can sort the resulting Hash, which converts it into an array:

grouped_titles = grouped_titles.sort_by{|k, v| k}
 => [["A", ["Apple", "anothersomething"]], ["B", ["Bob"]]] 

Then you can iterate over the resulting array.

<% grouped_titles.each do |initial_letter, titles| %>
 -display stuff here-
<% end %>

Note that this is grouping in Ruby, rather than in the database (which would be done by using a .group method on the relation), but if you were already displaying all the data in the page, this method should be fine.