mySQL natural number ordering

Had a situation today where I needed to order a list that looked like "DISTRICT 1, DISTRICT 2...DISTRICT 10, DISTRICT 11". Ordering this field with a simple ORDER BY groupField ASC puts "DISTRICT 10" and "DISTRICT 11" before "DISTRICT 2", which is not what I wanted. Also, the field wasn't always going to be setup as single string, a space, and a number, so I couldn't just SUBSTRING out the trailing number. Found the solution in the mySQL forums:

ORDER BY LENGTH(groupField) ASC, groupField ASC

now the ordering is as you'd expect from a user standpoint.