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Data Analysis

Hank Boudreau
Hank Boudreau
804 Points
Posted by Hank Boudreau
Hank Boudreau
804 Points

How to sort by descending, regardless of special characters?

I was in the first practice question and was just messing around to test my knowledge. I wanted to combine the names of actors and the number of letters in their name and wrote this query. Finally I wanted to sort them in descending order.

select name || " (amount of letters) " || length (name) as "Name + Letter #" from actors
order by name desc

When it returned the results I was expecting a name that started with a Z. What I got was Íñigo Garcés followed by Édgar Ramírez, etc. I don't understand the programming behind SQL databases but clearly, letters with characters are "lower" than Z in the alphabet. So I'm wondering how would I get these names in the right place, regardless of their characters? Eg: Inigo would be next to someone named Indiana.

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,186 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,186 Points

This would typically be done by using the COLLATE function, but I'm not sure there's a predefined collation sequence in SQLite to fold international characters as you want (there is in other DB engines). You may need to do some research on defining custom collation sequences.