non alpha character search

[Pig]

I'm trying to set up a search to find all the entries in a column that do not start with a-z (eg: #, -, _, etc).

My thought was to use an "not in" clause, but I don't know of anyway to isolate the search to just the first character of the word (nor could I find anything in the mysql manual).

I also tried " < 'a' " but that just grabbed everything
Any thoughts?

[Sxooter]

I'm pretty sure MySQL has a substring function somewhere in there.

Of course, I'd use regex, but you ain't got those in your database... 😉