Re: Ordering 'A', 'B', ..., 'Z', 'AA', 'AB', ...

At 4:47 PM -0300 2/20/2002, Jon Lapham wrote:
>Hello folks-
>
>Does anyone have a suggestion on how to order a varchar(2) column
>containing values like: 'A', 'B', ..., 'Z', 'AA', 'AB', ...
>
>What I would like to to return the tuples in this order:
>A
>B
>C
>...
>X
>Y
>Z
>AA
>AB
>...

In transact-sql, I've used a structure something like:

ORDER BY
    CASE WHEN TABLE.MYCOLUMN LIKE '__'
         THEN TABLE.MYCOLUMN
         ELSE ' ' || TABLE.MYCOLUMN END

The syntax may be a little different in pg, though.

It's also easy enough to do in Perl with a custom sort sub.

-Charles
--
Charles Albrecht                                      Euonymic Solutions
charlesa@pobox.com                                       P.O. Box 300623
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