I have a “year” field in my database of 190 records. It’s a text field — not a numeric field — because I occasionally include date ranges (“1970-1978”) or a question mark (“197?”).
When I sort based on year, the sort order seems to be incorrect in a few cases. Here’s the sort order I notice:
?
196?
197?
198?
1940-1954?
1960
1960?
1964
1966
1969
1970
1971
…and so on
This mostly seems correct, but I can’t make sense of why “196?”, “197?”, and “198?” are listed 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in this list. Alphabetical order would dictate they come later.
I’m using Version 5.3.8 (Build 1821)
When Tap Forms sorts the strings, it uses a function called localizedStandardCompare when comparing values to be sorted. This sorting order would be the same sorting order that you see in files in the Finder.
I did a test of your values and I found the Finder is sorting them exactly the same way. See attachment.
So that explains why it’s sorting that way.
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Thank you. Now that I look at it, I suppose macOS is seeing my strings “196?”, “197?”, etc. as the numbers “196” and “197”, which would understandably sort before “1940”.
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