Question

I’m trying to order items based on an attribute value:

<xsl:apply-templates select='Question'>     <xsl:sort order='ascending' select='@Value'></xsl:sort> </xsl:apply-templates> 

This does order them, but I could have values like 1,2,3, … 10, 11, … 20 and it will order them 1,10,11, … 2,20… 3. etc.
I could also have values like 1.A, 1.B, 2.A, 2.B etc.

How can I order these values to take into account the numeric content and the alphabetic, in that priority?

Answer 1

If you know that every question has a multi-part number, you could handle them with two <xsl:sort> instructions:

<xsl:apply-templates select='Question'>   <xsl:sort select='substring-before(@Value, '.')' data-type='number' />   <xsl:sort select='substring-after(@Value, '.')' /> </xsl:apply-templates> 

If some of the numbers might have multiple parts and some not, I guess the best thing to do is:

<xsl:apply-templates select='Question'>   <xsl:sort select='substring-before(concat(@Value, '.'), '.')' data-type='number' />   <xsl:sort select='substring-after(@Value, '.')' /> </xsl:apply-templates> 

The extra concat(@Value, '.') adds a ‘.‘ to the end of the value so that the substring-before() always gets the number.