I'm trying to query a database of Book titles based on the first letter of the title. However, I want to ignore common words such as "The" and "A".

So when searching for books that start with the letter "T"

```
"The Adventures of Huck Finn" - would NOT be matched
"Transformation of a Runner" - would be matched

```

I'm not very experienced with REGEX, but this is what I have so far (where $first\_letter could equal 't')

```
... WHERE title = '^[(a )(the )]*[$first_letter]' ...

```

This successfully matches book titles that start with a particular letter even after the words "A" or "The", but doesn't ignore those words. So if $first\_letter='t', it would match BOTH books mentioned above.

I've tried googling it, but haven't found any solutions. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Kevin