order by, ignore articles

[troncale]

I would like to request help using the 'order by' function. Is there a mechanism in MySQL that makes 'order by' ignore articles (An, The, A) and sort on the first letter of the next word?

My SELECT statement would look something like this:

"SELECT title FROM book_table WHERE subject = 'Anthropology' ORDER BY title;

As it is, the title "The Arts of Anatolia" would come after the title "Greek Pottery". I was wondering how to allow Mysql to ignore the "The".

Thanks for your help!

James

 

[piti]

SELECT
title,
CASE
WHEN (LEFT(title, 4) = 'The ') THEN TRIM(LEADING 'The ' FROM title)
WHEN (LEFT(title, 3) = 'An ') THEN TRIM(LEADING 'An ' FROM title)
WHEN (LEFT(title, 2) = 'A ') THEN TRIM(LEADING 'A ' FROM title)
ELSE title
END AS ordercolumn
FROM book_table
ORDER BY ordercolumn

hope this works