Question

I have column values like A1,A20........A10. When I do an order by, the values are displayed as A1,A10, A2 and so on…

But, I want to display the columns in this format

A1
A2
A10
A20 and so on..

Can someone please tell me how do I achieve this sorting?

Answer 1

if the pattern of your column is just A-Z + some numbers, you could sort with

select id
  from your_table
 order by regexp_replace(id, '[0-9]', ''), 
          to_number(regexp_replace(upper(id), '[A-Z]', ''));

regexp_replace(id, '[0-9]', ''),

the above just keeps “A”s first, then “B” etc. you can remove that if you don’t want to do that.

but if any row has any other non-numeric characters, the query would fail on invalid number.

eg:

SQL> select * from tester order by id;

ID
-----
A1
A10
A2
A3
A4
A5
A6
A7
A8
A9
B1
B10
B2
B3
B4
B5
B6
B7
B8
B9

20 rows selected.

SQL> select id from tester order by regexp_replace(id, '[0-9]', ''), to_number(regexp_replace(upper(id), '[A-Z]', ''));

ID
-----
A1
A2
A3
A4
A5
A6
A7
A8
A9
A10
B1
B2
B3
B4
B5
B6
B7
B8
B9
B10