SORTING PROBLEM WHEN NUMBERS ARE MIXED WITH LETTERS

Recently I have been presented with a problem of figuring out how to display information from a table which has a VARCHAR2 field that can contain numbers as well as alphanumeric characters. When just doing a simply ORDER BY the fields is sorted in an ASCII way in which numbers are out of numeric order and are in order of there ASCII representation. I understand why the problem is occurring, but I'm stuck trying to find an easy way in SQL to sort these values properly.  To make things a little tricker, there can be a mixture of alphanumeric characters as well as numbers. Here is some example data as seen with just a plain ORDER BY sort:

136b
137
138
220
238
239
60
61
62
63
TESTRUN
TESTRUN2
TestRun
ab
abc10
abc2

Through searching the USENET I did manage to come up with an SQL statement that comes really really close to solving the problem:

select NAME, nvl( trim (trailing from translate( lpad(NAME,40,' '),
'1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',
'1234567890' ) ), NAME) new_a

 from table1
 order by new_a;

That statement returns the following:

60
61
62
63
137
138
220
238
239
136b
abc2
abc10
TESTRUN2
TESTRUN
TestRun
ab

This was really close, but what the statement works best with is if the field only contains JUST numbers or JUST letters. If there is a mixture of both it kind of gets screwed up. The line out of place is the 136b. It really should be right before the 137 line.

This seems like it should be a real common problem, considering this type of data must exist in many systems. Does anyone out there have any idea how I could possibly get my data to sort properly? When I say properly, I mean that it would be sorted like the following:

60
61
62
63
136b
137
138
220
238
239
abc2
abc10
TESTRUN2
TESTRUN
TestRun
ab

In a nutshell, this means that to be sorted properly all lines starting with a number would come first, followed by lines starting with letters. If the letter lines have numbers, they would proceed any lines that have ONLY letters. This seems like a fairly normal sort order to me.

Thanks in advance for any help. I appreciate it greatly.

Rob Received on Thu Dec 13 2001 - 14:56:54 CST