Re: sorting troubles

Thanks for your input everyone! The easiest way to do this was ansding this to the SELECT clause: select col from DB order by substring(col, 1, 1) ASC, substring(col, 2) DESC Seems to work fine. -Will ""Richard Lynch"" <ceo@l-i-e.com> kirjoitti viestissä:51664.67.184.121.112.1145949572.squirrel@www.l-i-e.com... > On Sat, April 22, 2006 4:49 am, William Stokes wrote: >> I have a column in DB that contains this kind of data, >> A20,B16,B17C14,C15,D13,D12 etc. >> >> I would like to print this data to a page and sort it ascending by the >> letter an descending by the number. Can this be done? Like >> >> A20 >> B17 >> B16 >> C15 >> C14 >> D13 >> D12 > > I personally would do it in SQL, since SQL has been specifically > fine-tuned for about 4 decades to do this [bleep] fast, while PHP has > not: > > select col from DB order by substring(col, 1, 1), substring(col, 2) > > You could also consider creating a "view" in your DB, if your DB > supports views. > > If not, and the dataset is VERY large, and/or your particular database > does not allow a function in ORDER BY clauses, I would suggest you add > two indexed fields and break that one column up into two. > > You'd need to add some kind of logic somewhere (triggers in the DB, > application logic, whatever) to manage the copying of the data from > the column to the other. > > No matter how you slice it, though, the LAST option I'd use would be > to use http://php.net/usort to sort the data from a DB in PHP. > Still, > it's an option, if your DB is particularly broken, to the point where > none of the above apply. I don't think any such DB exists with PHP > support, unless maybe via ODBC, but I may as well provide the complete > answer, eh? > > -- > Like Music? > http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm