Re: sorting library of congress numbers

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 16:37, Rick Schumeyer wrote:
> I have a table where one of the columns is a library of congress
> number.
>
> I would like to be able to ORDER BY this column.
>
>
>
> Currently, the column is a varchar.  Unfortunately, a normal string
> comparison
>
> will not work.
>
>
>
> First, has anyone done this already?
>
>
>
> If not, I’m thinking I would need to:
>
> 1)      define a new type to hold LOC numbers.
>
> 2)      write a function that determines less than, greater than
>
>
>
> It seems like I’m missing something here.  I have not yet defined a
> new
>
> type…is defining less/greater part of that process?
>
>
>
> Is there a simpler way to do this?

You might want to do something along the lines of storing the PARTs of
the loc number, then using lpad/rpad in a function to put them together
in such a way to as to render them orderable.  Is there an URL on how
LOC numbers are ordered?