Query ?

[ainoy31]

Does anyone know why this query is not ordering the list via descend?

 

$sql = "SELECT sessionid, legal_name, trade_name, length(trade_name) AS length, physical_state AS state, physical_city AS city,  entity_county AS county FROM table.form WHERE sessionid='$sessionid' ORDER BY length DESC";

 

Thanks.  AM

[Maq]

What is the actual order?  What type is length?

[PFMaBiSmAd]

length(trade_name) AS length would order the results by the length of the string in trade_name. What results are you getting and what results do you expect?

[ainoy31]

PFMaBiSmAd -

 

I want it to order by the length of the string but it is not doing that.

[PFMaBiSmAd]

Cannot help you until you show what you are getting, because we only see the information in your post and so far you have not provided any specific information to go by.

 

Have you checked if your data in the table contains any non-printing/white-space characters?

 

Edit: and assuming that you have read the documentation for what you are doing -

LENGTH(str)

 

Returns the length of the string str, measured in bytes. A multi-byte character counts as multiple bytes. This means that for a string containing five two-byte characters, LENGTH() returns 10, whereas CHAR_LENGTH() returns 5.

 

Are you using any multi-byte character encoding?

[akitchin]

from the mysql manual, the LENGTH() function returns the string's length in bytes, not in characters:

 

LENGTH() in MySQL manual

 

try using CHAR_LENGTH() and see if that fixes your issue. otherwise try actually echoing length in each iteration to see what it contains.

[o3d]

try "ORDER BY length(trade_name) DESC" instead of "ORDER BY length"

 

But the example below works for me:

 

select length(column1) as length, column1
from
(
select 'aaaaaa' as column1
union
select 'aaa' as column1
) as a
order by length DESC

 

Returns:

6	aaaaaa
3	aaa

 

 

[fenway]

you should probably use char_length(), so that your code works if you ever switch to a multi-byte collation.