Sort cards Numeric by (a mixed string)

[Brian Yennie]

>> does nothing... no error, no resort... I assume because the mixed 
>> strings cannot be evaluated as numbers...
>> What would be a work around...?? I could use some complicated parsing 
>> routine but it would fail if another user decided to use a different 
>> delimiter (in this case he's used a dot), so I need a global solution 
>> that says to Rev -forget the alpha characters at the end of the 
>> string, just use the numbers at the beginning. iViewMedia does this 
>> automatically in its catalog system... i.e. it assumes if there are 
>> numbers at the beginning to sort by numbers and "10*alphaChars" 
>> follows "9*alphaChars", not "1*alphaChars" in any listing....

Here's one that's not too complicated:

put fld "photoFileName" into pFileName
## extract the numeric prefix
put empty into numericPrefix
repeat for each char c in pFileName
    if (c is a number) then
        put c after numericPrefix
   else
       exit repeat
   end if
end repeat

## remove it from the original
if (numericPrefix is not empty) then delete char 1 to 
length(numericPrefix) of pFileName

## pad it with zeros
repeat until length(numericPrefix) = 5
    put "0" before numericPrefix
end repeat

## put it back on
put numericPrefix before pFileName
put pFileName into fld "photoSortField"

...

sort cards ... by fld "photoSortField"


HTH,
Brian