Perhaps there is a need for some additional sub-types of the character data type to clarify sort order preferences, but the forcing of quotes or leading 0's seems, somehow inelegant. As a short-term kludge, may I suggest using a hybrid sort paradigm, which recognizes character stings which appear numeric, and sorts them all in numeric order (as if they had been presented right justified) before all alphabetic strings. --- Forwarded mail from mmciflist@ndbdev.rutgers.edu >From mmciflist@ndbdev.rutgers.edu Fri Jul 12 09:13:54 1996 Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 09:13:50 -0400 >From: Peter Keller <bsspak@bath.ac.uk> To: yaya@aip.org Subject: Sorting order. Hi everyone, I'm starting to play around with sorting/searching, but I have hit the classical problem of sorting as strings vs. sorting as numbers. For example, compared as numbers, 2 < 10, but compared as strings, '10' < '2' . This is a problem where CIF items are defined in the dictionary as character types, but in practice, people tend to convert them from numbers. _atom_site.id is a case in point: its _item_type_list.primitive_code is 'char', so based purely on information in the dictionary, a sort would have to use character, rather than numerical sorting. I would like to suggest, that when numbers are output as the contents of such data items, they should be output right-justified in a fixed-width field, and either quoted ( ' 2' < ' 10' ), or padded with zeros ( 00002 < 00010 ), which solves the problem. Regards, Peter. ======================================================================== Peter Keller. \ Dept. of Biology and \ "...nothing works, but Biochemistry, \ everything survives...." University of Bath, \ Bath, BA2 7AY, UK. \ --- Carlos Fuentes ------------------------------\----------------------------------------- Tel. (+44/0)1225 826826 x 4302 | Email: P.A.Keller@bath.ac.uk (Internet) Fax. (+44/0)1225 826449 | P.A.Keller%bath.ac.uk@UKACRL (BITNET) ======================================================================== --- End of forwarded message from mmciflist@ndbdev.rutgers.edu