20 March 2007 13:00 (EST)
By default MySQL sorts UTF8 fields using following order:
- Numbers,
- English characters, and than
- Non-English characters.
But if you need to display fields with non-English characters before anything else, you can use following SQL statement:
SELECT name, IF(name REGEXP '^[a-zA-Z0-9]', 0, 1) AS sort FROM test ORDER BY sort DESC, name