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

Here is a simple one if titles only have the version as a number:

ORDER BY CAST(REGEXP_REPLACE(title, "[a-zA-Z]+", "") AS INT)';

Otherwise you can use simple SQL if you use a pattern (this pattern uses a # before the version):

create table titles(title);

insert into titles (title) values 
('Final Fantasy'),
('Final Fantasy #03'),
('Final Fantasy #11'),
('Final Fantasy #10'),
('Final Fantasy #2'),
('Bond 007 ##2'),
('Final Fantasy #01'),
('Bond 007'),
('Final Fantasy #11}');

select REGEXP_REPLACE(title, "#([0-9]+)", "\\1") as title from titles
ORDER BY REGEXP_REPLACE(title, "#[0-9]+", ""),
CAST(REGEXP_REPLACE(title, ".*#([0-9]+).*", "\\1") AS INT);     
+-------------------+
| title             |
+-------------------+
| Bond 007          |
| Bond 007 #2       |
| Final Fantasy     |
| Final Fantasy 01  |
| Final Fantasy 2   |
| Final Fantasy 03  |
| Final Fantasy 10  |
| Final Fantasy 11  |
| Final Fantasy 11} |
+-------------------+
8 rows in set, 2 warnings (0.001 sec)

You can use other patterns if needed. For example if you have a movie "I'm #1" and "I'm #1 part 2" then maybe wrap the version e.g. "Final Fantasy {11}"