Question

Doing the following query:

SELECT title FROM table ORDER BY title

gives me:

"Hello"
"Zebra"
Apple
Beta
Cactus

How would I ORDER BY the first alphabetical character, in order to get:

Apple
Beta
Cactus
"Hello"
"Zebra"

?

Answer 1

You will have to remove quotes before sorting data. You can easily remove them using TRIM function in MySQL as:

SELECT title 
FROM table 
ORDER BY TRIM(BOTH '"' FROM title);