>>>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) .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?
>
>For simplicity I'd go with parsing each 'field' and padding it out. So for the example above you'd end up with something like:

001.001
>001.001
>001.010.R.001
>001.200
>001.R

A simple index on the whole record should then give you a valid sort. I guess something like the '10DP' would need a routine to insert stops before padding.....

Viv,

thats the basic idea I have (and do via xbase commands).

see message#1451180

But its so xbase.