Ignoring first symbol/letter

Hi,

The best way to ignore the first character is to use the a_z_listing_item_index_letter filter. This can be added to your theme or child-theme’s functions.php and will ignore any non-alphabetical letter:

add_filter( 'a_z_listing_item_index_letter', 'ignore_a_z_non_alphabetical_letters_at_start_of_title', 10, 3 );
function ignore_a_z_non_alphabetical_letters_at_start_of_title( $index_letters, $item, $type ) {
    // if we already have an alphabetical letter, return it immediately
    if ( preg_match( '/^[A-Za-z]$/', $index_letters[0] ) ) {
        retrun $index_letters;
    }

    // loop through the title letters and return the first alphabetical letter
    for ( $i = 0; $i < mb_strlen( $item->title ); $i++ ) {
        $letter = mb_substr( $i, 1 );
        if ( preg_match( '/^[A-Za-z]$/' $letter ) ) {
            return array( $letter );
        }
    }

    // if we get here, then there are no alphabetical letters in the title so return the original index
    return $index_letters;
}

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Dani Llewellyn. Reason: add missing regex `//` characters

You’re quite right, I think the $item->title should be $item->post_title.

When the site dies there should be some logged errors in a file on your server somewhere. This is likely called “Error Log” or “error.log” or “error_log”. It is possible that the functions.php file had an error with your changes that caused the site to stop, which the error log would help us to isolate. I suspect I probably made a mistake in the code sample above.