Question

I have a table which has one TEXT column that looks like this:

0-4 mėn
5-12 mėn
1-3 metai
4-6 metai
7 metai ir daugiau

The text is in Lithuanian. Now the database was designed so it holds the values as TEXT and this is very bad, however I need to query it, to have the data sorted.

I have written this query:

SELECT DISTINCT `Age`, 
SUBSTRING_INDEX(Age, " ", -1) as `AgePrefix`, 
SUBSTRING_INDEX(Age, " ", 1) as `AgeValue` 
FROM `suoPage` 
ORDER BY `AgePrefix`, `AgeValue`

It does what I need, however the gotcha is “7 metai ir daugiau”. SUBSTRING_INDEX get’s AgePrefix for it as “daugiau” and so it appears as the first record. How can I solve this issue?

Answer 1

For sorting purpose you need to extract whole string after first space to do that you can use SUBSTRING function as:

SELECT DISTINCT `Age`, 
       SUBSTRING(Age, LOCATE(" ", Age)) as `AgePrefix`, 
       SUBSTRING_INDEX(Age, " ", 1) as `AgeValue` 
FROM `suoPage` 
ORDER BY `AgePrefix`, `AgeValue`