>Still not clear I'm afraid. Taking '1.10.R.1' as an example: As I understand it you break it down to 4 fields (stop is always a seperator - never a decimal point) i.e:
>1
>10
>R
>1
>For sorting purposes should the items that look like numbers be treated as numbers or character strings? Is there a maximum length to any field within a record or for the number of fields that a record can contain?
>eg. Could '123.345678.ABC.234' occur?

Hi Viv, Tore,

>Still not clear I'm afraid.
You are not the only one.

I try to answer all at once here.

The point separates the words. (It would be Decimal separator anyway because this is germany 1k=1.000; a tenth = 0,1)

The lenght of a single word is limited by the length of the field that holds the value.

The words are numbers only in the sense of sort. I think words starting with an alpha should go behind those starting with numbers.

*sorted
1.01
1.2
1.10.R.1
1.200
1.R

the field is 40 chars, so worst case could be a single word of 40 chars or 21 words of a single char.

Did I mention that I found a record with 10DP, eg mixed digits/alphas in a word? I hate this. I have no idea where to sort this in. This is out of the specs but what does the customer care about specs?


Agnes