Selecting only rows beginning with a number.

[dkin]

I have a small portion of my site dedicated to sorting objects by letter, but when they start with a number I am stuck. Anyone know how to do this?

[vincevincevince]

Can you explain a bit more? Are you talking MySQL here?

[dkin]

sorry, yes I am talking mysql.

rows are like this

Jeffrey
Jason
jackie
7Donna
78 Billy

etc

I only want to select the ones which begin with a number.

[jatar_k]

here is a wild guess on my part, my regex sucks but i was bored

select * from mytable where mycolumn REGEXP '^[1-9]';

anyone do better than that?

[Philosopher]

Sounds like you could use a bit of pattern matching for what you need.

[dev.mysql.com...]

Should give you all the info needed to do exactly what you want (Select only records beginning with number).

Example:

Select * from table_name where column REGEXP '^[0-9]';

Should find all records beginning with a number.

[edit]jatar_k was faster (but I included 0). :)[/edit]

[sun818]

mySQL reference manual has a lot of examples. You can try the left function. Select the first character between 0 and 9.

[dev.mysql.com...]

LEFT(str,len)

Returns the leftmost len characters from the string str.

mysql> SELECT LEFT('foobarbar', 5);
-> 'fooba'

[dkin]

works beautifully, thanks jatar and philosopher

[jatar_k]

hehe, oh yeah 0, is that a digit these days ;)

[coopster]

Not always, sometimes it is a slang named applied to people that forget that it is a digit ;)

[jatar_k]

everybody's a comedian ;)