sorting - Django: ordering numerical value with order_by

Question

I'm in a situation where I must output a quite large list of objects by a CharField used to store street addresses.

My problem is, that obviously the data is ordered by ASCII codes since it's a Charfield, with the predictable results .. it sort the numbers like this;

1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 2, 20, 21....

Now the obvious step would be to change the Charfield the proper field type (IntegerField let's say), however it cannot work since some address might have apartments .. like "128A".

I really don't know how I can order this properly ..

Answer 1

If you're sure there are only integers in the field, you could get the database to cast it as an integer via the extra method, and order by that:

MyModel.objects.extra(
    select={'myinteger': 'CAST(mycharfield AS INTEGER)'}
).order_by('myinteger')