Question

I am having a sorting issue with oracle 10g. Not sure if it is specific to 10g or not.

I have the following table:

ID  NAME
 1  A.1
 2  A.3
 3  A.4
 4  A.5
 5  A.2
 6  A.5.1
 7  A.5.2
 8  A.5.10
 9  A.5.10.1
10  A.5.3

Performing the generic SELECT NAME FROM table_name ORDER BY 1 produces:

A.1
A.2
A.3
A.4
A.5
A.5.1
A.5.10
A.5.10.1
A.5.2
A.5.3

I would like it to sort correctly when those sections have numbers greater than 9, like so:

A.1
A.2
A.3
A.4
A.5
A.5.1
A.5.2
A.5.3
A.5.10
A.5.10.1

I have way more number entries than this with varying lengths and many sections with number segments greater than 10. I was trying to mess around with regexp_replace() in the order by clause but have had no luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try this

WITH t AS
(
  SELECT id,name,
  xmltype('<r><c>' ||replace(NAME, '.', '</c><c>')||'</c></r>') AS xmlname
  FROM table1
)

SELECT name ,id
FROM t
ORDER BY lpad(extract(xmlname,'//c[1]/text()').getstringval(), 5, '0')
||lpad(extract(xmlname,'//c[2]/text()').getstringval(), 5, '0')
||lpad(extract(xmlname,'//c[3]/text()').getstringval(), 5, '0')
||lpad(extract(xmlname,'//c[4]/text()').getstringval(), 5, '0')

Here is a fiddle