In October of 2011, I shared an example of a peculiar set of sort requirements. Today, I am going to share another similar set of requirements. Based on prior experience, when I saw this request on a sort order, I was sure I could find a simpler solution. Today, I will share the requirements and solution with you.
Requirements
Given a set of characters, you must be able to sort according to the following:
- !
- “
- $
- ?
- @
- ^
- {
- >
- ASCII values
Setup
To demonstrate the requirements and solution, let’s create a temp table and populate it with some values like those in the requirements.
CREATE TABLE #Chars
(
MyChar CHAR(1)
)
INSERT INTO #Chars (MyChar)
VALUES
('!'), ('"'), ('$'), ('?'), ('@'), ('^')
, ('{'), ('>'), ('1'), ('2'), ('3'), ('4')
, ('5'), ('6'), ('7'), ('8'), ('9'), ('A')
, ('B'), ('C'), ('D')Solution
SELECT *
FROM #Chars
ORDER BY MyChar COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_Cp1251_CS_ASSometimes the simplest solution requires a lot of testing. When I came across the requirements, I thought it could be solved via a collation. The problem was that I did not know which collation. I had to test a few collations to find the collation that would create the correct result set. If you are interested in learning about other collations, you can read this article.
