Thanks, but in my case the solution of Thierry gave the better result.

I did not know that you can use PADL without third parameter, good to know.

>First select all employees into a readwrite cursor. Then issue the command index on padr(iif(val(empno)>0,padl(empno,20),upper(empno)),20) tag ordered.
>
>
>>Hello,
>>
>>I was trying to fix a sorting issue on a alpha-numeric field. We have an Employee number field, and most companies use numbers for this, but some may also allow characters to be entered as Employee number. So we made it a character field, with the result that when sorting in the search result it would look awkward for those that have only numbers:
>>1
>>10
>>11
>>2
>>3
>>etc.
>>
>>Only option I can think of is to have a setting in the program that would allow only for numeric data in this field, and then sort it on VAL(). Maybe someone has a another idea? Like if they want to prefix with a character code "A" or "B" etc, and the sorting would still work properly? But I doubt this can be done without specifying the format in the user preference.
>>A1
>>A2
>>A3
>>A10
>>etc