Question

I have a column called price and all the values are TEXT so like this: “$26.71”.
I want to sort this column in descending order but i can’t because the column is not defined as INTEGER and it has a “$” character in front of all the values.
What should i do in order to make this work??
Thanks.

Answer 1

You can combine ltrim and cast to get an actual numeric from which to sort by:

select * from table order by cast(ltrim(price, '$') as numeric) desc

Note, ltrim also works if you have multiple currencies. Just line them all up, like '$€'. ltrim removes any and all characters from the left side until it hits a character that’s not in that string.