Question

I know you can sort by integer values in sphinx but is there a way I can get sphinx to sort by a text field alphabetically?

I want to search on first name and instead of sorting on relevance, I’d like to sort by the first name alphabetically. I know I can do this in mysql but in mysql I don’t have features like stemming (as far as I know).

Thanks Everyone!

Answer 1

You can use strings as ordinal attributes – Sphinx will collect all values of the given column, sort them alphabetically, then give the first one a value of 1, the second a value of 2, and so forth. This allows for sorting, but not filtering.