Question

I’m wondering if there is a way I can pass in a string (varchar) to a (custom) function in MySQL and then have it output the string ordered alphabetically. I am unsure of how you would actually reorder the string.

IN : dbca
OUT: abcd

Answer 1

One could probably define a stored function that could do this, but it would be pretty awkward and inefficient. This doesn’t taking advantage of the strengths of SQL.

However, it would be simple in many dynamic programming languages:

<?php
$in = "dbca";
$out = str_split($in);
sort($out);
print_r($out);