Re: Bug Sorting Zeros

David Marston wrote:
> Rechell Schwartz writes:
>>Similarly, when sorting strings is there a way to cause numerical
>>values to appear after all string values instead of before?
>
> If your data type is "text", numbers get no special recognition. It
> appears that you want to do a two-level sort, where the upper level
> is a boolean on numeric vs. non-numeric (likely inefficient to
> calculate) and the lower sort is numeric. If you also need the text
> strings to be alphabetically ordered at the same time that the
> numbers are sorted, you'll have to look at it as a two-pass
> situation, possibly using template modes.

You don't have to go to a two-pass solution unless you want to - you
can do a three-level sort:

  * boolean sort on whether the value is a number
    (get all the numbers to come after the string values)
    
  * numerical sort
    (sort the numbers in numerical order, strings all sort as NaN
     so their order doesn't change)
     
  * text sort
    (sort the strings in alphabetical order; numerical order won't
     change unless you have numbers with leading zeros, in which
     case they'll be put before their equivalent number without)

Here's an example source:

<values>
   <val>5</val>
   <val>foo</val>
   <val>0</val>
   <val>31</val>
   <val>bar</val>
   <val>031</val>
</values>

Template:

<xsl:template match="values">
   <xsl:for-each select="val">
      <xsl:sort select="number() or number() = 0" />
      <xsl:sort select="." data-type="number" />
      <xsl:sort select="." />
      <xsl:copy-of select="." />
   </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

Result:

<val>bar</val>
<val>foo</val>
<val>0</val>
<val>5</val>
<val>031</val>
<val>31</val>

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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