Help me combine these conditions for determining if this list item begins with a new letter
<p>Maybe I'm having a bad day, but I can't seem to combine these 2 conditions into 1. They obviously should be, because they output the exact same data. The following code creates a list with A-Z to act as anchor links, and is then meant to traverse an array in the format <code>'word'=&gt;'definition'</code>. I wanted the PHP to output a h3 element with the current letter everytime it detected a new letter.</p>

<p>Here is what I have</p>

<pre><code>    $letters = range('A', 'Z');
    echo '&lt;em&gt;Jump to:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;ul class="letters"&gt;';
    // anchors
    foreach ($letters as $letter) {            
        echo '&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#botany-words-' . $letter . '"&gt;' . $letter . '&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;';      
    }        
    echo '&lt;/ul&gt;';        
    // start listing them!        
    $currentLetter = 0;        
    echo '&lt;dl id="botany-words"&gt;';

    foreach($content as $botanyWord=&gt;$definition) {

         if ($botanyWord == key(array_slice($content, 0, 1))) { // must be first, aka 'A'

             echo '&lt;h3 id="botany-words-' . $letters[$currentLetter] . '"&gt;' . $letters[$currentLetter] . '&lt;/h3&gt;';


         } 

        if (substr($botanyWord, 0, 1) != $letters[$currentLetter]) {  // if the first character of this botany word is different to the last              
            echo '&lt;h3 id="botany-words-' . $letters[$currentLetter] . '"&gt;' . $letters[$currentLetter] . '&lt;/h3&gt;';

            $currentLetter++;
        }
    ?&gt;

        &lt;dt&gt;&lt;?php echo $botanyWord; ?&gt;&lt;/dt&gt;
        &lt;dd&gt;&lt;?php // echo $definition; ?&gt;&lt;/dd&gt;

    &lt;?
    }
    echo '&lt;/dl&gt;';
</code></pre>

<p>Everytime I tried to do </p>

<pre><code>if ($botanyWord == key(array_slice($content, 0, 1)) || substr($botanyWord, 0, 1) != $letters[$currentLetter])
</code></pre>

<p>it didn't work right, and error'd because it overflowed the 26th index (obviously being 26 chars in the alphabet).</p>

<p>Thank you for your assistance!</p>
