casting in MySQL

Question

I have a varchar field that looks like (sadly I have no control over the data):

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:30:00 EDT

Is there a way to cast this into a timestamp format so that I can then sort based on it?

Answer 1

SELECT  STR_TO_DATE('Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:30:00 EDT', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%i:%s EDT')