[aklug] Re: MySQL sorting alphanumerics

I keep forgetting that there is a specific way to do things and a
generic way to do things. Generic would be using a natural sort which
takes a lot into account. Specific would be knowing your limits and
working directly within them. So I thunk to myself - Shane - what is
the super specific way to do this assuming there are only 1-99 ports
in a switch and Null-A-Z modules.

The subselect is for show.. stating it can deal with random sorting.
I'm not sure if using three substrings is less evil than the natural
sort function. But it's specific :)

mysql> select a from (select a from xyz order by RAND()) as abc order
by substring(a,1,1), substring(a,3,1), substring(a,2,1);
+------+
| a |
+------+
| 1 |
| 10 |
| 2 |
| 3 |
| 4 |
| 42 |
| 9 |
| A3 |
| A9 |
| A10 |
| C7 |
| D3 |
+------+
12 rows in set (0.00 sec)
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Received on Sat Apr 3 09:30:33 2010