ORDER BY issue

Hi all

I have a field in my table which currently stores a question reference for each record (i.e. 5.1 through to 5.14)

I am currently selecting this data and ordering by this reference field but the values are being ordered in the wrong way:

they are coming out like:

5.1
5.10
5.11
5.12
5.13
5.14
5.2
5.3 and so on....

I actually need to display this data in the correct way 5.1 - 5.14. Can anyone advise how i do this in its simplest form please?

Thanks in advance
K

KrisCons wrote:
I actually need to display this data in the correct way

what do you mean by "correct". they are being ordered correctly.

Believe it should be

5.1
5.2
....
5.9
5.10

would the simplest way be splitting that into 'section' and 'subsection'?

SELECT * FROM reference_fields WHERE section='5' ORDER BY subsection ASC

Yep! It's ordering them as if they were a string... try:

SELECT * FROM reference_fields WHERE section='5' ORDER BY ABS(subsection) ASC

This returns the absolute value so, assuming you have no negative numbers, it should order them by numeric value.