How to order by a text column that contains int in SQL? - sql

Question

My current SQl statement is:
SELECT distinct [Position] FROM [Drive List] ORDER BY [Position]ASC
And the output is ordered as seen below:
1_A_0_0_0_0_0
1_A_0_0_0_0_1
1_A_0_0_0_0_10
1_A_0_0_0_0_11
1_A_0_0_0_0_12
1_A_0_0_0_0_13 - 1_A_0_0_0_0_24, and then 0_2-0_9
The field type is Text in a Microsoft Access Database. Why is the order jumbled and is there any way of correctly sorting the values?

Answer 1

"Why the order is jumbled":
The order is only jumbled because you are compiling it with your human brain and are applying more value than the computer does because of your symbolic understand of what the values represent. Parse the output as though you could only understand it as an array of character strings, and you were trying to determine which string is the greatest, all the while knowing nothing about the symbolic value of each character. You will find that the output your query generated is perfectly logical and not at all jumbled.
"Any way of correctly sorting the values"
This is a design issue and it should be addressed if it really is a problem.
Change 1_A_0_0_0_0_0 to 1_A_0_0_0_0_00
Change 1_A_0_0_0_0_1 to 1_A_0_0_0_0_01
Change 1_A_0_0_0_0_2 to 1_A_0_0_0_0_02
etc
This will make the problem go away.
Use these two separate queries:
SELECT distinct [Position] FROM [Drive List] WHERE [Position] LIKE '1_A_0_0_0_0_?' ORDER BY [Position] ASC
SELECT distinct [Position] FROM [Drive List] WHERE [Position] LIKE '1_A_0_0_0_0_??' ORDER BY [Position] ASC
...add to a temp table and append to get the results to display properly.

Answer 2

If you want sorting which incorporates the numerical values of those substrings, you can cast them to numbers.
In the simplest case, you're concerned with only the digit(s) after the 12th character. That case would be fairly easy.
SELECT
sub.Position,
Left(sub.Position, 12) AS sort_1,
Val(Mid(sub.Position, 13)) AS sort_2
FROM
(
SELECT DISTINCT [Position] FROM [Drive List]
) AS sub
ORDER BY 2, 3;
Or if you want to display only the Position field, you could do it this way ...
SELECT
sub.Position
FROM
(
SELECT DISTINCT [Position] FROM [Drive List]
) AS sub
ORDER BY
Left(sub.Position, 12),
Val(Mid(sub.Position, 13));
However, your actual situation could be much more challenging ... perhaps the initial substring (everything up to and including the final _ character) is not consistently 12 characters long, and/or includes digits which you also want sorted numerically. You could then use a mix of InStr(), Mid(),and Val() expressions to parse out the values to sort. But that task could get scary bad real fast! It could be less effort to alter the stored values so they sort correctly in character order as #Justin suggested.

Answer 3

Your jumbled order is caused because it is a text field. As for solutions you could attempt to add an additional column in your table that is numeric and order by that instead of Position. I would need more information about what data you have and what it means to suggest a good way to do this.

Answer 4

This is the right sort for a string.
In alphabetical order 10 come before 2.
For orderby the last number you can try with SUBSTRING and CAST (or CONVERT) commands