Php Curl and Json - php

Question

My question is I want to get acess my fb friends using curl and decode into json then i want to show only those friends whose name starting with letter a such as aman,adam etc pls help me..Following is my code.
<?php
// create a new cURL resource
$json_url="https://graph.facebook.com/100001513782830/friends?access_token=AAACEdEose0cBAPdK62FSjs4RvA21efqc8ZBKyzAesT5r4VSpu0XScAYDtKrCxk4PmcRBVzE2SLiGvs2d5FeXvZAD72ZCShwge3vk4DQqRAb8vLlm1W3";
$ch = curl_init( $json_url );
// Configuring curl options
/* $options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Content-type: application/json')
);
// Setting curl options
curl_setopt_array( $ch );
*/// Getting results
$result = curl_exec($ch); // Getting jSON result string
$obj = json_decode($result, true);
foreach($obj[data] as $p)
{
echo '
Name: '.$p[name][first].'
Age: '.$p[age].'
';
}

Answer 1

You will offcourse try not to hardcode "a" but for this purpose :
foreach($obj[data] as $p){
if(strtolower(substr(trim($p[name][first]),0,1)) == 'a'){
echo 'Name: '.$p[name][first].'Age: '.$p[age];
}
}

Answer 2

Btw, it is not a good idea to post security tokens (in URL) to public places.
Since the name is string, you can simply iterate over that array and filter by name:
$letter = 'A';
foreach($obj['data'] as $p) {
if ($p['name'][0] == $letter) {
// do something with $p
}
}
But there is a little problem with UTF-8 -- this solution (and that one with substr too) will not work on multibyte characters. So you need to use mb_substr instead of plain substr function:
foreach($obj['data'] as $p) {
if(mb_strtolower(mb_substr($p['name'], 0, 1))) == 'Á'){
echo "Name: ", $p['name'], "\n",
"Age: ", $p['age'], "\n";
}
}