MySQL: Selecting rows ordered by character count

Question

In MySQL, how can I order my query by character count?

Answer 1

Try using the LENGTH function:

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY LENGTH(myField);

Depending on what you're doing, you might want to use CHAR_LENGTH instead:

A multi-byte character counts as a single character. This means that for a string containing five two-byte characters, LENGTH() returns 10, whereas CHAR_LENGTH() returns 5.

If you don't know what that means, you probably want LENGTH.