I have a list of items, that are both alpha and numeric. By default the alpha items appear last in the list. How can I have them appear before the numeric items.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: kitten,

You can set a variable (&AlfNum = IF ... THEN ... ELSE ...) or field (AlfNum/A1 = IF ... THEN ... ELSE ...) to check for alpha / numberic and sort (NOPRINT) on that first.

What's your source (TABLE or DM)? Can you provide a sample?

Have you tried changing the sequencing to Descending order?
/* BY feild DESC
*/

So you want your reports' sort sequence to resemble EBCDIC collation sequence.

It should be sufficient to group the values according to the first character, and allow ASCII order to take it from there. Just DEFINE:

 myInit/A1 = EDIT(myField,'9');
 mySort/A1= IF myInit GE '0' AND myInit LE '9' THEN 'A'
       ELSE IF myInit GE 'A' AND myInit LE 'Z' THEN '0'
       ELSE IF myInit GE 'a' AND myInit LE 'z' THEN '0'
       ELSE myInit;

and sort your report

BY mySort NOPRINT
BY myField

I would use Doug's idea. In this example, I isolate the first character of MODEL and determine if it's alpha or numeric:

DEFINE FILE CAR
MODEL1/A1 = SUBSTR(20, MODEL, 1, 1, 1, 'A1');
ALPHA_NUM/A1 = IF CHKFMT(1, MODEL1, '9', 'I6') EQ 0 THEN 'N' ELSE 'A';
END

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM
SALES
BY ALPHA_NUM NOPRINT
BY MODEL
END

If you want to have this sort sequence permanently on your system, this can be achieved by following this document

Doug and Francis's solution worked perfect. Thanks to all of you. This forum is really great and you guys ROCK!!!!!

Thanks for the docs Alan, didn't know that could be done.