1000 is more than 200

[tac2mike]

Can someone please teach my Zencart list of products that a series product with 200 in the name should come before a product with 1000 in it's name? This is real annoying. I don't want to and shouldn't have to go back through and set sort orders to make this happen. As soon as Zencart sees a 1, it puts it before anything else.

[gjh42]

To a human brain, it seems stupidly simple... but there are many ways that numbers could appear in product names, and parsing the name to single out embedded undefined multi-digit numbers, remember them and sort them in relation to other similar names would exponentially increase the processing time for the sort.
You can add zeros to fill out the maximum number of digits, and it might work to add spaces, non-breaking spaces, or some other character similarly. There is a PHP "natural sort" function that sorts numbers in string format as humans would see them, but I don't know if it would still work on mixed alphameric content.

[kuroi]

Product names are alphanumeric strings and when sorted alphabetically 1 comes before 2, irrespective of the number of zeros that follow.

However, Zen Cart does have a product sort order field for each product that is used in some places to allow site owners to override the normal ordering.

[rickobee]

This s a big problem for me as well. I know this thread is a year old but it seemed a good place to add this question:

Is it possible to manually sort only a group of products?

In my case I sell comics which, of course, have issue numbers. But not all of my products need sorting (where issue numbers don't go past #9, for example).

I'm guessing the answer is 'no' as I couldn't find any good solution in the forums. But I had to ask. It just seems so silly that default ordering ends up looking like this:

Super Fun Comics #1
Super Fun Comics #10
Super Fun Comics #17
Super Fun Comics #2
Super Fun Comics #23
Super Fun Comics #3
Super Fun Comics #36

Thanks in advance!

[schoolboy]

As kuroi has pointed out, when digits are listed in an alpha-numeric string, they are regarded as TEXT, not numerical values.

This is true in ANY computer program - not just zencart.

The only way to force a desired sort order is to use the sort ordering system in zencart.

We had a project a couple of years ago where over 10,000 products, in over 400 categories/sub-categories needed specialist sorting.

It took a while, but we used Easy Populate to help us, where we brought the EP file into MS Excel, and using MS Excel formulae and data sort features, we were able to insert the desired ZC sort order values in a few hours - rather than the weeks it would have taken to do it product-by-product in ZC.

[rickobee]

As kuroi has pointed out, when digits are listed in an alpha-numeric string, they are regarded as TEXT, not numerical values.

This is true in ANY computer program - not just zencart.

Well, I can grasp the concept, I just have trouble accepting it! When I access my files in Windows they're ordered as I'd expect. Super Fun Comics #2 comes before Super Fun Comics #10, for example.

I don't doubt what you're saying and I'm not trying to put down Zen Cart (which I like a lot), just saying the default sorting isn't what I'd expect.

Anyhow, as I mentioned, I was hoping there might be a way to manually sort a small group (a particular comic series, for example). A workaround, a mod, a secret trick!

Thanks for the suggestion, I appreciate it. I was really hoping for something a bit simpler...