PHP: do an ORDER BY using external data?

Question

Ahoy all! Long story short with this one if you don\'t mind lending a hand to this novice PHPer. :)

I have a database field called \"Categories\" that has this stored:

Answer 1

And just so future onlookers have it .... here is the explode code

$query2 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM categorytable");
        while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query2)){
            $categories = html_entity_decode($row['categories']);
            $thelist = explode(',', $categories);

        foreach($thelist as $order){
            if(trim($order) != ''){
                $order = trim($order);
                $order = ", '".$order."'";
                $theorder .= $order;
            }
        }

and then for the query, just put in the the order variable

SELECT DISTINCT(type), type FROM the_categories ORDER BY FIELD(type" . $theorder .")")