Question

I have this MySQL query:

SELECT
  id,
  title
FROM song
WHERE text IS NOT NULL
    AND title LIKE "%foo%"
ORDER BY title

What is a good way to adjust the ordering here so that those rows that starts with foo always comes before those that just contains it?

In other words, I want those LIKE "foo%" to come before those LIKE "%foo%", without duplicates.

Answer 1

You can try something like the following. I tried it out in SQL Fiddle and it works.

SELECT
  id,
  title
FROM song
WHERE text IS NOT NULL
    AND title LIKE "%foo%"
ORDER BY CASE WHEN title LIKE "foo%" THEN 1 ELSE 2 END, title