Natural Sort in MySQL

Question

Is there an elegant way to have performant, natural sorting in a MySQL database?

For example if I have this data set:

• Final Fantasy
• Final Fant

Answer 1

So, while I know that you have found a satisfactory answer, I was struggling with this problem for awhile, and we'd previously determined that it could not be done reasonably well in SQL and we were going to have to use javascript on a JSON array.

Here's how I solved it just using SQL. Hopefully this is helpful for others:

I had data such as:

Scene 1
Scene 1A
Scene 1B
Scene 2A
Scene 3
...
Scene 101
Scene XXA1
Scene XXA2

I actually didn't "cast" things though I suppose that may also have worked.

I first replaced the parts that were unchanging in the data, in this case "Scene ", and then did a LPAD to line things up. This seems to allow pretty well for the alpha strings to sort properly as well as the numbered ones.

My ORDER BY clause looks like:

ORDER BY LPAD(REPLACE(`table`.`column`,'Scene ',''),10,'0')

Obviously this doesn't help with the original problem which was not so uniform - but I imagine this would probably work for many other related problems, so putting it out there.