How to sort MySQL results with letters first, symbols last?

Question

Long-time reader, first-time poster here.

I\'m trying to figure out how to sort a list of artists for a music app I\'m writing.

To help understand the databa

Answer 1

You can add an extra ORDER BY clause that puts the items that start with a non-alphabetic character last, like so:

    SELECT artist
      FROM songs
  ORDER BY artist REGEXP '^[^A-Za-z]' ASC, artist

This should move every artist that doesn't start with A-Z or a-z to the end of your ordering.