Question

Let’s say I have the following rows:

id     data (TEXT)
1      abc"100"dfg
2      abc"200"dfg
3      abc"150"dfg

Would it be possible to order the results by the number in quotes (abc”X”dfg) and return the number?

Answer 1

If the numeric fields are always in the same place you could write

ORDER BY 0 + SUBSTRING(data, 5, 3)

or if they are always bound by the only double quotes in the string you could write

ORDER BY 0 + SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX(data, '"', -2), '"', 1)

Although the substrings are numeric they are still string values and MySQL will sort them lexically. For a numeric sort they must be forced to numeric values by adding zero.