Alphabetic searches excluding non-alphabetic characters

[Michael Eastwood]

Hi,

I'm attempting to write an SQL query that will alphabetically sort data from a table, but ignoring strings starting with characters such as " ' . - * (, including spaces. I've written an absolutely disgusting looking query (shown below) that works to some extent, but not as well as I'd like.

SELECT Data FROM Table ORDER BY TRIM(' ' FROM TRIM('-' FROM TRIM('.' FROM TRIM('*' FROM TRIM('#' FROM TRIM('\(' FROM TRIM("'" FROM TRIM('"' FROM TRIM(' ' FROM ColumnToSortBy)))))))));

The problems are that:

a) I have to backslash the open parenthesis in my Perl script for that be happy, in which case mySQL looks for this literally and fails to strip them out.

b) This query only trims characters from the beginning of the string. Ideally I'd like to remove any instance of these characters from the string throughout, as they don't have any important influence on the alphabetic order.

c) It's a mess!

If anyone has any ideas how I might go about doing this, that would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,
Michael