title: Filter column value by the first character?
body: <p>This is what I've done so far.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$filtered_results = array();
  
  $result = $this-&gt;db
                 -&gt;select('name')
                 -&gt;from('user')
                 -&gt;get()
                 -&gt;result_array();    
  
  foreach($result as $name)
  {
      if($name[0]=='a')
      {
          filtered_results[] = $name;
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The above code logically wastes too much time processing all the results if my table contains tons of rows. So, the other way around is to directly retrieve only results with <code>'a'</code> as their <code>$name[0];</code>. Is this possible?</p>
  
  <pre><code>-&gt;where('name'.[0],'a')
  </code></pre>