* Michael Winston > At 2:06 PM -0500 10/16/2003, Dan Nelson wrote: > >In the last episode (Oct 16), Michael Winston said: > >> Is there any way to do "natural sorting" in MySQL? That is: > >> Chapter 1 > >> Chapter 2 > >> Chapter 10 > >> > >> instead of > >> > >> Chapter 1 > >> Chapter 10 > >> Chapter 2 > >> > >> If not, are there any plans for this feature in future releases? > >> Would be pretty helpful... > > > >You can easily enough write a UDF that zero-pads all numbers in a > >string to N digits, which would let you do "SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER > >BY dwim_sort(textfield,5)" > > "Easily enough"? ha ha. I've looked at the example UDF and realized > that I am in over my head on that one. Still, I wasn't even aware of > UDFs, so thanks. > > Anyone done this already or know of a good repository of UDFs? > Google didn't provide anything useful...
I don't know of any UDF repository, just wanted to mention the option to cast a substring to an integer and sort on that. It's not real natural sorting, but it works for your example data, maybe you can use it: SELECT chapter FROM tab1 ORDER BY MID(chapter,8)+0 -- Roger -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]