Django: ordering numerical value with order_by

Question

I\'m in a situation where I must output a quite large list of objects by a CharField used to store street addresses.

My problem is, that obviously the data is ordere

Answer 1

If you're using PostgreSQL (not sure about MySQL) you can safely use following code on char/text fields and avoid cast errors:

MyModel.objects.extra(
    select={'myinteger': "CAST(substring(charfield FROM '^[0-9]+') AS INTEGER)"}
).order_by('myinteger')

Answer 2

If you're sure there are only integers in the field, you could get the database to cast it as an integer via the extra method, and order by that:

MyModel.objects.extra(
    select={'myinteger': 'CAST(mycharfield AS INTEGER)'}
).order_by('myinteger')