Question

Is there a way to easily sort in SQL Server 2005 while ignoring hyphens in a string field? Currently I have to do a REPLACE(fieldname,’-‘,”) or a function to remove the hyphen in the sort clause. I was hoping there was a flag I could set at the top of the stored procedure or something.

Access and the GridView default sorting seems to ignore the hypen in strings.

Answer 1

I learned something new, just like you as well

I believe the difference is between a ‘String Sort‘ vs a ‘Word Sort‘ (ignores hyphen)

Sample difference between WORD sort and STRING sort http://andrusdevelopment.blogspot.com/2007/10/string-sort-vs-word-sort-in-net.html

From Microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322112

For example, if you are using the SQL collation ‘SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS’, the non-Unicode string ‘a-c’ is less than the string ‘ab’ because the hyphen (‘-‘) is sorted as a separate character that comes before ‘b’. However, if you convert these strings to Unicode and you perform the same comparison, the Unicode string N’a-c’ is considered to be greater than N’ab’ because the Unicode sorting rules use a ‘word sort’ that ignores the hyphen.

I did some sample code you can also play with the COLLATE to find the one to work with your sorting

DECLARE @test TABLE (string VARCHAR(50))  INSERT INTO @test SELECT 'co-op' INSERT INTO @test SELECT 'co op' INSERT INTO @test SELECT 'co_op'  SELECT * FROM @test ORDER BY string --COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_Cp1_CI_AS --co op --co-op --co_op  SELECT * FROM @test ORDER BY CAST(string AS NVARCHAR(50)) --COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_Cp1_CI_AS --co op --co_op --co-op