On 11/29/2010 10:43 AM, thedevguy wrote:

> Does Firebird contain a natural sort order algorithm of some kind? We have an alphanumeric field that we would like to sort in the following order:
>
> 1
> 10
> 100
> 1010
> 20
> 25
> 123aef
> aef123
>
> I tried using different character sets but was not able to find a resolution. I can't convert the values to numerics because there will be alphanumerics in the field. There is no standard type of values that I could substr out as well. Meaning we could have any type of alphanumerics.
>

OK, that's an interesting problem. Could you describe the
sorting algorithm that produces that result? Not mathematically
or in code, just simple English words.


Cheers,

Ann