You should be able to sort it numerically if I understand where the
data is coming from. Could you provide a snippet of the code and from there
it should not be that hard to provide code to sort numerically.
Wags ;)
-----Original Message-----
From: John Almberg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 13:18
To: Beginners
Subject: How to sort a character-type field, numerically
I'm trying to sort a SQL table that contains a character-type field that
contains mostly numbers. This field always contains either a number or a
number followed by a character. Like '57' or '57a'.
I'd like to sort the table *numerically* on this field, not *alphabetically*
on this field. That is, I'd like the table to be sorted like:
1 ...
2a ...
3 ...
4d ...
NOT like:
1 ...
11 ...
111a ...
2a ...
22 ...
See what I mean? This is a common problem, I think, when you sort an
character type field that contains numbers. The sort comes out all wrong.
It would be great if I could get rid of the characters, then I could make
the field a pure integer and the sort would work great, but that's not
possible (or easily possible.)
A pseudo-code solution would be SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY
INT(char-field), but unfortunately even MySql doesn't have such an INT()
cast funtion.
I'm asking this perl group, because I suspect that my only solution is to
sort the result set in perl. Am I right about this???
Thanks.
-- John
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