[SOLVED] Concatenate Zero's

[wintallo]

Hey, I was wondering how I could concatenate zeros at the beginning of a integer. For example, I would want all variables to have 8 digits so I concatenate. 8 zeros in front of 5 (00000005), 5 zeros in front of 4536 (000004536), etc. I would do this so that when I'm ordering a mySQL database by a field called "score" that it orders correctly. If I don't do this it orders 34880 after 120661. I would want it to automatically calculate how many zeros it would need to concatenate at the beginning of a number.  Thanks for reading.

Joel
[email protected]

[Destruction]

I believe there's an option in MySQL syntax to do that when creating/amending table structure called ZEROFILL.  You may want to look at that.

HTH

Dest

[Psycho]

"If I don't do this it orders 34880 after 120661"

Then you must have that field set as a string field instead of a numeric field. Unless htere is a specific reason to do so, I would think a 'score' should be numeric.

[btherl]

mjdamato is right.. the field should be integer or numeric.

But you might be able to get away with [code=php:0]ORDER BY CAST(score as unsigned integer)[/code]

[wintallo]

I just made the field an integer and used fill zeros and it worked fine. Thanks guys!

Joel
wintallo.com

[btherl]

You don't need to zero fill once it's an integer, but it won't do any harm :)  Apart from slowing things down.