Comments on: MySQL Natural Sort Order By on Non-Numeric Field Type

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:53:36 +0000

If the length of the alphabetic portion of the string is constant, like it was in my case, you can use something like this: ORDER BY SUBSTR(name FROM 1 FOR 6), CAST(SUBSTR(name FROM 7) AS UNSIGNED), SUBSTR(machine.name FROM 7) Notice that the ordering will only be different from a straight alphabetic ordering when there are numeric digits starting at character 7. So, a list like ['string123', 'string5', 'string20'] which would normally be sorted as ['string123', 'string20', 'string5'], will instead be sorted as ['string5', 'string20', 'string123'].

By: Edwin Sandoval

Edwin Sandoval — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:39:08 +0000

Good Mysql Tip, thank very much : )

By: gaarai

gaarai — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:16:56 +0000

Yes. I’ve since found this out. My “trick” worked for the initial data sets that I needed it for, but it obviously doesn’t work as expected for all (most?) datasets.

For more than a year now I have revisited this problem off and on and have yet to find a better (read “actual”) solution to this need without using code to reorder the results.

By: Eli

Eli — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:44:08 +0000

this method only works for numeric, does not work for strings with numeric values

does not work:
a10,a11,a120,a21,a3,aa1

also does not work:
10a,10c,10b

also I believe a1 comes first in your list not last, since a1 casts to int 0