Question

I have a table in a MySQL database which contains data like this;

ID  text
1   Action Jackson
2   The impaler
3   The chubby conquistador
4   Cornholer

I want to display them in alphabetical order minus the leading “The “. This is what I’ve come up with which works.

SELECT ID, CASE LEFT(l.text, 4) WHEN "The " THEN CONCAT(RIGHT(l.text, LENGTH(l.text) - 4), ", The") ELSE l.text END AS "word"
FROM list l

This solution seems a little clunky, does anyone have a more elegant answer?

Answer 1

I think this is what you are looking for:

SELECT ID,
       text
FROM list l
ORDER BY TRIM(LEADING 'The ' FROM text);