MySQL Sorting

[yasunobu13]

I have a MySQL table with a varchar column that represents sections in a catalog. THe entries look like the following

1.1
1.2
2.1
2.7
3.1
3 - 4.4
3 - 4.4
4.1
9.8, 9.9
10.1
12.7

And so on. I want to be able to sort the rows based on this column in some sensical way (Section then subsection), but the entries 3-4.4 and 9.8,9.9 are throwing me off. Any ideas on how I can organize this to b sortable and updatable?

[a_slosh]

First idea is to split this column in two and have start section and end section. This way all entries are in a standard format. When you retrieve the records you can just do a check and if start and end section are the same then just display one otherwise display "start" - "end"

Let me know if I haven't provided enough / well explained detail; I'm in a bit of a rush.

[yasunobu13]

Thanks for responding

Your idea makes sense, but the problem is that there is a possibility of a start and end sections or just multiple sections. Like

9.7, 9.9, 10.2

Even if it were just start and end. How would I store the sections in order to sort them? Split it into 4 columns, start_section, start_subsection, end_section, end_subsection and store as INTs?

[Jeff2A]

If it were me (and depending on the size of the data), I'd probably add an additional column that was "order_by", and create an admin tool to manually sort the entries from 1 to 'n' ('move up', 'move down', etc) - then, you sort based on that known integer column rather than some variable string that you don't seem to have much control over.

[yasunobu13]

Gotcha, thanks for the help!