Sorting/Displaying by Numeric and then Alphabetically

I have a list of these type of numbers with letters stored in a mySQL table

1
2a
2b
2c
3a
3b
4
5a
5b
10

Some have letters and some don't.

For the sample data above, I'd want it do display on the page like this

1
2a / 2b / 2c
3a / 3b
4
5a / 5b
10

and here is the basics of what I have so you can base your example off this which is just listing them on the page straight down

$sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM data") or die(mysql_error());

while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($sql))
{
    $dataID = $row['dataID'];
    echo $dataID . "<br />";
}

I could probably do thi开发者_JAVA技巧s with some substrings and if statements, but I have a feeling it can be done in a much better way... probably with regular expressions

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Look at the natsort() function.

This function implements a sort algorithm that orders alphanumeric strings in the way a human being would while maintaining key/value associations. This is described as a "natural ordering".

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A guy from here helped me out and gave me this nice chunk of code. Did the trick just right.

$query = "select dataID, dataID * 1 as ord FROM data order by ord, dataID";
$result = mysql_query($query);

$heading = null; // remember last heading, initialize to a value that will never exist as data
while(list($dataID,$ord) = mysql_fetch_row($result)){
    if($heading != $ord){
        // a new (or first) heading found
        if($heading != null){
            // not the first heading, close out the previous section
            echo implode (' / ',$data) . '<br />';
        }
        $heading = $ord; // remember new heading
        // start a new section
        $data = array();
    }
    // handle each piece of data
    $data[] = $dataID;
}
// close out the last section
echo implode (' / ',$data) . '<br />';