From: Dan Nelson
Date: October 16 2003 7:06pm
Subject: Re: natural sorting
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/151807
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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)"

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@stripped