Order by leading digits

from the Artful Common Queries page


To have column values 1abc,10abc,8abc appear in the expected order 1abc,8abc,10abc, take advantage of a trick built into MySQL string parsing ...
SELECT '3xyz'+0;
+----------+
| '3xyz'+0 |
+----------+
|        3 |
+----------+
to write ...
SELECT ...
...
ORDER BY colname+0, colname;

Last updated 31 Mar 2012