Question

I have a field in my database as text, which contain a D-M date value. The year is a new field. So ORDER BY year ASC is not that difficult. Now I wanted to also ORDER BY date.
Only problem is, ORDER BY year ASC, ORDER BY date does not work. I think because of the text field. Is it still possible to sort them on year, month, day ASC?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Use SUBSTRING_INDEX():

... ORDER BY year ASC, SUBSTRING_INDEX(date, '-', -1) ASC, SUBSTRING_INDEX(date, '-', 1) ASC

• SUBSTRING(date, '-', -1) will give you everything after the - (the month).
• SUBSTRING(date, '-', 1) will give you everything before the - (the day).