[SOLVED] Order By Part Of String

[fanfavorite]

I am trying to write an order by command that first sorts by the Name, which is easy and then sorts by the date.  The problem is the date format is 7/7/2007-7/14/2007.  So what I need is to use Substring or something to sort the date before the "-".  I tried the following, but it won't put everything in the right order:

 

ORDER BY Cottage,SUBSTRING(Dates, 0, LOCATE('-',Dates))

 

Any ideas guys?  Thanks! 

[bubblegum.anarchy]

To order by the start date:

 

ORDER BY Cottage, str_to_date(substring_index(Dates, '-', 1), '%c/%e/%Y');

 

To order by the end date:

 

ORDER BY Cottage, str_to_date(substring_index(Dates, '-', -1), '%c/%e/%Y');

[fanfavorite]

Perfect!  Thanks!