Comments on: Sorting strings like numbers in PostgreSQL http://www.ghidinelli.com/2006/06/23/sorting-strings-like-numbers-in-postgresql Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:09:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: brian http://www.ghidinelli.com/2006/06/23/sorting-strings-like-numbers-in-postgresql#comment-42 brian Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:22:03 +0000 http://www.ghidinelli.com/2006/06/23/sorting-strings-like-numbers-in-postgresql/#comment-42 Possibly - every club uses it slightly differently and very few use letters at all. I think most often it's either "just because" or it's some kind of class/group designation in which case the number is "more important". If this becomes the case, we could fix it by prepending "999" to the front of any value that begins with a letter and that would solve 99% of the cases since rarely does a number exceed 3 digits (in fact, basically never). There are multiple other ways of grouping people in the system so using the number to do that would be inefficient at best. Possibly - every club uses it slightly differently and very few use letters at all. I think most often it’s either “just because” or it’s some kind of class/group designation in which case the number is “more important”.

If this becomes the case, we could fix it by prepending “999″ to the front of any value that begins with a letter and that would solve 99% of the cases since rarely does a number exceed 3 digits (in fact, basically never).

There are multiple other ways of grouping people in the system so using the number to do that would be inefficient at best.

]]> By: Nathan Dintenfass http://www.ghidinelli.com/2006/06/23/sorting-strings-like-numbers-in-postgresql#comment-41 Nathan Dintenfass Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:01:59 +0000 http://www.ghidinelli.com/2006/06/23/sorting-strings-like-numbers-in-postgresql/#comment-41 Wouldn't you want "T50" to display after the numeric values? Or, is the "T" in an ID like that always non-meaningful as far as the sort? Wouldn’t you want “T50″ to display after the numeric values? Or, is the “T” in an ID like that always non-meaningful as far as the sort?

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