What are best practices for implementing a "group break" feature in PHP when displaying sorted data with different groups based on the first letter of a field?

When displaying sorted data with different groups based on the first letter of a field, a common practice is to implement a "group break" feature to visually separate the groups. This can be achieved by checking the first letter of each field value and displaying a group break header when the letter changes. 

// Sample array of data sorted by a field
$data = [
    ['name' => 'Alice', 'age' => 25],
    ['name' => 'Bob', 'age' => 30],
    ['name' => 'Charlie', 'age' => 28],
    ['name' => 'David', 'age' => 22],
    ['name' => 'Eve', 'age' => 27],
    ['name' => 'Frank', 'age' => 31],
];

$prevLetter = '';
foreach ($data as $item) {
    $firstLetter = strtoupper(substr($item['name'], 0, 1));
    
    if ($firstLetter != $prevLetter) {
        echo "<h2>Group $firstLetter</h2>";
        $prevLetter = $firstLetter;
    }
    
    echo $item['name'] . ' - ' . $item['age'] . '<br>';
}

Keywords

sorting group break PHP array_chunk alphabetically

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