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MySQL Custom Sort

February 1st, 2007 Posted in Code

Here's something neat. If you want your SQL results in an order that's not alphabetical or numerical, this little bit of code will allow you to specify what order you want your fields to appear.

PLAIN TEXT
MySQL:
  1. ORDER BY CASE
  2.     WHEN `col` = 'item' THEN 1
  3.     WHEN `col` = 'thing' THEN 2
  4.     WHEN `col` = 'stuff' THEN 3
  5.     WHEN `col` = 'boom' THEN 4
  6.     ELSE 5
  7. END

Note that these are not in alphabetical order. You can still add other sort fields before and after this case. Pretty neat!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “MySQL Custom Sort”

  1. Bryan Says:

    August 25th, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Great tip, this is exactly what I was looking for! I just wanted to pull one category to the top of the list that fell in the middle in alpha sort and this tip worked perfectly.

    Thanks for posting, I have learned MySQL through a very incremental approach and this is a great addition to my arsenal.

    Regards,
    Bryan


  2. Jamie Tibbetts Says:

    December 11th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

    Genius. Thanks.


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