mysql 'order by' issue with arabic letters

Question

I have Arabic words in my database:

Example:

أحمد يحيى
احمد اسعد

The question is:

I want to get the names sorted by name.

The expected result is:

احمد اسعد
أحمد يحيى

But I got:

أحمد يحيى 
احمد اسعد

أ before ا

I tried this

select name from emp order by name; 

please help.

Answer 1

Can you please check your database collations, they should either be set to utf8_general_ci or utf8_unicode_ci. This should let you perform order by etc correctly.

If running a stand alone query try this:

SET NAMES 'utf8';
SET CHARACTER SET utf8;
select name from emp order by name;