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 database structure: Rather than having a relational system where each song in the songs table has an artist ID that references a row in the artists table, I simply have a list of songs with the artist's name as a string in a column. I then use GROUP BY artist in a MySQL query to return a list of individual artists.

My app retrieves this data from my server in the form of a JSON-encoded array which is the result of the following MySQL query:

SELECT artist FROM songs GROUP BY artist ORDER BY artist ASC

However, this query results with artists with names like &i, +NURSE, and 2007excalibur2007 being sorted before the alphabetical results (such as AcousticBrony, ClaireAnneCarr, d.notive, etc.).

What I need is the artists whose names begin with numbers and symbols returned after the alphabetically-sorted artist list.

The solution can be PHP-based, but I'd prefer the elegance of it being done in the MySQL query.

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.

Answer 2

This will put all the artists who's names begin with a letter in a-z before those that don't:

SELECT DISTINCT artist
FROM songs
ORDER BY artist REGEXP '^[a-z]' DESC, artist

See it working online: sqlfiddle

---

But you might prefer to store a second column with the simplified name so that you can put them in an order that makes more sense:

artists

artist            | simplified_name
------------------------------------
&i                | i
+NURSE            | nurse
2007excalibur2007 | excalibur

The values for simplified_name cannot be easily generated in MySQL, so you may want to use a general purpose programming language to pull out all the artists, transform them to simplified names, then populate the database with the results.

Once this is done, you can use this query:

SELECT DISTINCT artist
FROM artists
ORDER BY simplified_name