Dan,
Thank you, that works! FYI, you can treat the field like a number,
including sorting, numeric functions, etc.
For example,
select * from table order by (text_field+0.0)
Steve Musumeche
CIO, Internet Retail Connection
steve@stripped
Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (Sep 28), Steve Musumeche said:
>
>> I think this method will work, however, when trying these queries, I get
>> a SQL syntax error.
>>
>> mysql> select cast('34' AS decimal);
>> ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the
>> manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right
>> syntax to use near 'decimal)' at line 1
>>
>
> The CAST function in mysql 4.1 and older can't cast to DECIMAL. 5.0
> and newer can. One easy way to convert strings to numbers in older
> mysql's is to add 0 to them:
>
> mysql> select ("1.10" + 0);
> +------------+
> | "1.10" + 0 |
> +------------+
> | 1.1 |
> +------------+
>
>
