stop words in mysql - ignoring a/an/the

[Paul Bramscher]

What are the mechanisms to make words like a/an/the in text and varchar
character fields ignored when performing SELECT and utilizing ORDER BY
in SQL queries?

I've done some hunting around into documentation on character sets (but
they are geared mainly at character-by-character rules) and saw some
reference to string collating and stop words -- but not seen any of this
all put together.

Thanks for any assistance,
Paul Bramscher

[Paul Bramscher]

Paul Bramscher wrote:

What are the mechanisms to make words like a/an/the in text and varchar
character fields ignored when performing SELECT and utilizing ORDER BY
in SQL queries?

I've done some hunting around into documentation on character sets (but
they are geared mainly at character-by-character rules) and saw some
reference to string collating and stop words -- but not seen any of this
all put together.

Thanks for any assistance,
Paul Bramscher

No way to make mySQL a library or title-friendly database? I'd like to
ORDER BY records while ignoring common words like a/an/the which often
start titles of books, journals, etc.

I've thought about filtering these out in the input side, perhaps
creating a mirrored field which performs the real ..."ORDER BY
title_filtered" -- and display the actual title in its place -- but this
seems a little kludgy, something the RDBMS should be able to handle
natively with a language ruleset.

Nobody experiment with anything like this?

[Bill Karwin]

Paul Bramscher wrote:

No way to make mySQL a library or title-friendly database? I'd like to
ORDER BY records while ignoring common words like a/an/the which often
start titles of books, journals, etc.

As far as I know, the only part of MySQL that supports stop words is the
Full-text Search feature.

There are ways to use the relevance value returned by MATCH() in an
ORDER BY clause (see user comment from Patrick O'Lone at
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Search.html), but this isn't
the same thing as sorting by the string while ignoring stop words.

I think you need to maintain an additional column, with stop words
filtered out of titles, so you can sort by the title in the format you want.

Regards,
Bill K.