Hasoft Software Engineering Introduces Regular Expression Sorting for Excel and VB/VBA
Summary
As soon as digits and/or characters from the alphabet are stored as text values, all bets on correctly sorting them are off unless a rigorous formatting discipline assures all strings are of the same length.Mix numerical and non-numerical characters, call the string license plate, chemical nomenclature or product code and the result becomes untrustworthy; ABC100 is placed before ABC2.As soon as digits and/or characters from the alphabet are stored as text values, all bets on correctly sorting them are off unless a rigorous formatting discipline assures all strings are of the same length.Mix numerical and non-numerical characters, call the string license plate, chemical nomenclature or product code and the result becomes untrustworthy; ABC100 is placed before ABC2.Even when the string contains of solely digits, the outcome is still highly unreliable as 120 is placed before 60.One could argue that the numerical part of an alphanumeric value should be read from right to left.