Question

I’ve got a varchar column that I want to sort numeric, which works great when using this trick: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5418033/1005334 (in short: ...ORDER BY Result * 1).

However, the table concerned contains results. So something like this occurs:

Result
------
DNS
DNF
1
2
3

The numbers are correctly ordered, but the DNF comes above the numbers when sorting like this. What I’d like is to have the numeric sort, but with non-numbers sorted alphabetically below the numbers. Like so:

Result
------
1
2
3
DNF
DNS

In what way can I modify the query (preferably only the ORDER BY clause) to get this result?

Answer 1

use LPAD

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_lpad

LPAD(yourField, 20, '0');

this will manage correct order for “varchar numeric fields” (10 will be after 2) and put strings at the end.

SqlFiddle

The second argument (20) is quite arbitrary. It should be equivalent to (or bigger then) the length of the longest string in your field.