I am a beginner to web development and I would like to know if there is a way to order my query by how close a character is to the beginning of the word.

By this I mean:

Let's say that I have a query with all the entries sharing an 'a' I want to order the entries by how close the 'a' is at the beginning of the word.

So if this was my query:

´walk´
´Andrew´
´leaf´
´umbrella´
´michael´

It would be ordered like this:

´Andrew´
´walk´
´leaf´
´michael´
´umbrella´

Can anyone help me?

CodePudding user response：

You could do it this way by first finding the position of the substring (a) and then ordering by that position (updated to exclude words with no a):

select word, position('a' in word) as position
from words
having position > 0
order by position asc

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!9/15350a/2

CodePudding user response：

select   word
from     words
order by ifnull(nullif(position('a' in word),0),999999999999)

Fiddle