[Koha-devel] Arithmetic operators on varchar column?

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Cab Vinton <bibliwho at gmail.com> wrote:
> Barcodes are stored in items.barcode as varchar type. Since our standard
> barcodes are numeric, is there a way to use arithmetic operators (<, >) on
> this column?
>
> items.barcode >= 34258000220000 in a SQL report does not work, though
> items.barcode LIKE '3425800022%' does.
>
> Note that we may have the odd barcode which is not numeric.

One thing you can do is to explicitly cast the barcode as an integer, e.g.

CAST(items.barcode AS UNSIGNED INTEGER) >=  34258000220000

Any barcode values that aren't strictly numeric will be treated as
having value 0.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
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