Question

I have been asked to sort a locations table in ascending order. The data in the table currently looks something like this:

• 100F01
• 105B02
• 10B01
• GK1-A01
• 201E12
• 20A01

However, when this data is displayed on the screen I want it to sort the numeric results in ascending order and then the string results in alphabetic order. The output should look something like this:

• 10B01
• 20A01
• 100F01
• 105B02
• 201E12
• GK1-A01

I have tried using the following code

SELECT location FROM freelocations
ORDER BY CAST(SUBSTRING(location, 1, 2) AS INT)

however, as expected, this returns an error message because some locations don’t start with a numeric:

Conversion failed when converting the varchar value ‘GK’ to data type int.

Any ideas or tips will be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

Maybe something like this?

select location 
from freelocations
order by 
    case 
       when patindex('%[^0-9]%', location) = 1 then 9999999999
       else cast(substring(location, 1, patindex('%[^0-9]%', location) - 1) as int)
    end,
    location

(It’s a bit clumsy due to SQL Server lacking a regex replace function)