METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DYNAMIC SORT COLLATION

摘要

A method and apparatus are disclosed for perfoming correct collation of strings regardless of the alphabetic/numeric mix of data in the string. All numeric strings are sorted numerically. All alphabetic strings are sorted alphabetically. Mixed strings containing both alphabetic and numeric data are sorted using a combination of the alphabetic and numeric sorts by dynamically recognizing numeric sequences within the strings and automatically dividing the strings into numerical and non-numerical (alphabetic) substrings. An alphabetic sort is used to compare a pair of non-numerical substrings, while a numerical sort is used to compare a pair of numeric substrings.