ORDER BY question

[phppup]

I have a database of assorted.  Each row contains defined QUANTITIES for each column item.

Example: columns for shirt, tie, pants, socks.

A row would indicate a purchase of 2 shirts, 1 tie, 0 pants, 3 socks for customer A.

Followed by a row indicate a purchase of 1 shirts, 1 tie, 4 pants, 2 socks for customer B, etc.

 

Now I want to sort EACH item, group them by quantity, and get an ordered list by quantity, that provides me with something like this:

 

1 shirt customer B

2 shirt customer C

3 shirt customer F

3 shirt customer H

4 shirt customer D, etc.

 

I am using this code for my query:

$query = "SELECT brisket, COUNT(brisket) FROM pass GROUP BY brisket ORDER BY brisket ASC";

 

but it is not organizing the info in a correlated manner.

 

Help?

 

[phppup]

OKAY, just noticed a twist!

Apparently I am getting the result I expected WITH a troubling EXCEPTION: the data is being IN ORDER from 0 thru 9, but 10 (which in this test sample is my LARGEST quantity) is being inserted between the ONE and 2 quantity. 

Not sure if this will occur with ALL teen values, as well as hundreds.

The column is a SMALLINT field (not sure if that makes a difference)>

Is there a ssolution for this situation?

[l0gic]

If you're only having up to 99 things then pad 1-9 with a  leading zero.

01, 02 .... 09, 10, 11, etc..

 

If you're having up to say 999 then pad more.

001, 002 .... 099, 100, 101, etc

 

That should fix it. There may be other ways aswell, but I'd just do ^ that.

[phppup]

How do I accomplish the task of PADDING? 

IS this a common occurence?