atoi()

[Anon]

Does mysql have anything like an atoi()
function?.....IE some low-level way to
interpret a string as an int?

I'm working on a simple table-based imitation
of semistructured data, where everything is
a string. But some strings need to be
interpreted as integers.

create table attribute
(
attr_id int primary key auto_increment,
label VARCHAR(48),
value VARCHAR(48),
data_type VARCHAR(32),
etc....
)

so I want to be able to say:

select attr_id, value from attribute
where label = 'GAIN'
and data_type = 'INTEGER'
and value > 100
order by value

.....and have the > 100 work
like the unix shell command sort -n

[majik-sheff]

Just add 0 to the value to forse type conversion to an integer:

select attr_id, value from attribute
where label = 'GAIN'
and data_type = 'INTEGER'
and (value + 0) > 100
order by value

or add 0.0 to forse it to floating point:

select attr_id, value from attribute
where label = 'GAIN'
and data_type = 'INTEGER'
and (value + 0.0) > 100
order by value