Question

I have a scalar value function that returns a varchar of data containing the ASCII unit seperator Char(31). I am using this result as part of an Order By clause and attempting to sort in ascending order.

My scalar value function returns results like the following (nonprintable character spelled out for reference)

• ABC
• ABC (CHAR(31)) DEF
• ABC (CHAR(31)) DEF (CHAR(31)) HIJ

I would expect that when I order by ascending the results would be the following:

• ABC
• ABCDEF
• ABCDEFHIJ

instead I am seeing the results as the complete opposite:

• ABCDEFHIJ
• ABCDEF
• ABC

Now I am fairly certain that this has to do with the non-printable characters, but I am not sure why. Any idea as to why that is the case?

Thanks

Answer 1

The sortorder can be influenced by your COLLATION settings. Following script, explicitly using Latin1_General_CI_AS as collation orders the items as you would expect.

;WITH q (Col) AS (
    SELECT 'ABC' UNION ALL
    SELECT 'ABC' + CHAR(31) + 'DEF' UNION ALL
    SELECT 'ABC' + CHAR(31) + 'DEF' + CHAR(31) + 'HIJ'
)
SELECT  *
FROM    q   
ORDER BY
        Col COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS

What collation are you using? You can verify your current database collation settings with

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('master', 'Collation') SQLCollation;