How do I sort a VARCHAR column in SQL server that contains numbers?

Question

I have a VARCHAR column in a SQL Server 2000 database that can contain either letters or numbers. It depends on how the application is configured o

Answer 1

I solved it in a very simple way writing this in the "order" part

ORDER BY (
sr.codice +0
)
ASC

This seems to work very well, in fact I had the following sorting:

16079   Customer X 
016082  Customer Y
16413   Customer Z

So the 0 in front of 16082 is considered correctly.

Answer 2

SELECT *, CONVERT(int, your_column) AS your_column_int
FROM your_table
ORDER BY your_column_int

OR

SELECT *, CAST(your_column AS int) AS your_column_int
FROM your_table
ORDER BY your_column_int

Both are fairly portable I think.

Answer 3

SELECT FIELD FROM TABLE
ORDER BY 
  isnumeric(FIELD) desc, 
  CASE ISNUMERIC(test) 
    WHEN 1 THEN CAST(CAST(test AS MONEY) AS INT)
    ELSE NULL 
  END,
  FIELD

As per this link you need to cast to MONEY then INT to avoid ordering '$' as a number.

Answer 4

There are a few possible ways to do this.

One would be

SELECT
 ...
ORDER BY
  CASE 
    WHEN ISNUMERIC(value) = 1 THEN CONVERT(INT, value) 
    ELSE 9999999 -- or something huge
  END,
  value

the first part of the ORDER BY converts everything to an int (with a huge value for non-numerics, to sort last) then the last part takes care of alphabetics.

Note that the performance of this query is probably at least moderately ghastly on large amounts of data.

Answer 5

This seems to work:

select your_column  
from your_table  
order by   
case when isnumeric(your_column) = 1 then your_column else 999999999 end,  
your_column   

Answer 6

This query is helpful for you. In this query, a column has data type varchar is arranged by good order.For example- In this column data are:- G1,G34,G10,G3. So, after running this query, you see the results: - G1,G10,G3,G34.

SELECT *,
       (CASE WHEN ISNUMERIC(column_name) = 1 THEN 0 ELSE 1 END) IsNum
FROM table_name 
ORDER BY IsNum, LEN(column_name), column_name;