* 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
