ignoring html tags in ORDER BY

[letimati]

Hi I have a content table with text in it and i want to order the query by the first letter of the content. Problem is there are some html tags in the content.

Is there a way I can ignore the html tags?

thanks

 

[letimati]

Just read over that myslef and I dont think I have made that clear sorry.

Basically I am wondering if there is a way of using regular expresions after the ORDER BY so i can exclude stuff in <> i.e. html tags.

 

[JarlH]

According to ANSI/ISO SQL-99 and later you can have expressions in the ORDER BY clause.

SELECT col1, col2 FROM tab WHERE col2 = 'whatever'
ORDER BY <expression-containing-column-reference>


Note that not all DBMS product support this feature.