Incorrect ordering on first column

[s_shrum]

This is weird.

Here is my links database column list:

area|title|url|description|hits

Here is my SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM links ORDER BY area

What I get back is a semi-ordered list...it looks like it ordered half of the records and then after that batch, restarted ordering again on the rest of the records so I see something like:

A
A
B
B
F
F
Z
A
B
F
F
Z
Z

Now if I order on a column that is not the first column like:

SELECT * FROM links ORDER BY hits

This works fine.

Any ideas?

Sean Shrum

[tomhath]

Any chance there are leading blanks or other whitespace in front of one or the other group?

[s_shrum]

I thought of that too when I first saw this result.

Nope; all the record names have no leading or trailing spaces.

All entries are capitalized first letter so this isn't an issue of 'A' vs 'a'.

Sean Shrum

[s_shrum]

Seems like there is a newline character (invisible) in some of the records...when I imported the data from my flat-files, some of the lines must have had extra characters on the end that got pre-pended to the fron of the next record.

Sean Shrum