ORDERBY "human" alphabetical order using SQL string manipulation - mysql

Question

I have a table of posts with titles that are in "human" alphabetical order but not in computer alphabetical order. These are in two flavors, numerical and alphabetical:
Numerical: Figure 1.9, Figure 1.10, Figure 1.11...
Alphabetical: Figure 1A ... Figure 1Z ... Figure 1AA
If I orderby title, the result is that 1.10-1.19 come between 1.1 and 1.2, and 1AA-1AZ come between 1A and 1B. But this is not what I want; I want "human" alphabetical order, in which 1.10 comes after 1.9 and 1AA comes after 1Z.
I am wondering if there's still a way in SQL to get the order that I want using string manipulation (or something else I haven't thought of).
I am not an expert in SQL, so I don't know if this is possible, but if there were a way to do conditional replacement, then it seems I could impose the order I want by doing this:
delete the period (which can be done with replace, right?)
if the remaining figure number is more than three characters, add a 0 (zero) after the first character.
This would seem to give me the outcome I want: 1.9 would become 109, which comes before 110; 1Z would become 10Z, which comes before 1AA. But can it be done in SQL? If so, what would the syntax be?
Note that I don't want to modify the data itself—just to output the results of the query in the order described.
This is in the context of a Wordpress installation, but I think the question is more suitably an SQL question because various things (such as pagination) depend on the ordering happening at the MySQL query stage, rather than in PHP.

Answer 1

My first thought is to add an additional column that is updated by a trigger or other outside mechanism.
1) Use that column to do the order by
2) Whatever mechanism updates the column will have the logic to create an acceptable order by surrogate (e.g. it would turn 1.1 into AAA or something like that).
Regardless...this is going to be a pain. I do not evny you.

Answer 2

You can create function which have logic to have human sort order like
Alter FUNCTION [dbo].[GetHumanSortOrder] (#ColumnName VARCHAR(50))
RETURNS VARCHAR(20)
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE #HumanSortOrder VARCHAR(20)
SELECT #HumanSortOrder =
CASE
WHEN (LEN(replace(replace(<Column_Name>,'.',''),'Figure ',''))) = 2
THEN
CONCAT (SUBSTRING(replace(replace(<Column_Name>,'.',''),'Figure ',''),1,1),'0',SUBSTRING(replace(replace(<Column_Name>,'.',''),'Figure ',''),2,2))
ELSE
replace(replace(<Column_Name>,'.',''),'Figure ','')
END
FROM <Table_Name> AS a (NOLOCK)
WHERE <Column_Name> = #ColumnName
RETURN #HumanSortOrder
END
this function give you like 104,107,119,10A, 10B etc as desired
And you can use this function as order by
SELECT * FROM <Table_Name> ORDER BY GetHumanSortOrder(<Column_Name>)
Hope this helps