Confusing Alphabetical sorting behaviour

[digitex]

I have a list of users that I want to output in a paginated directory in alphabetical order by last_name. When I first wrote it, my selector looked like this:

$members = $pages->find("template=user, roles=member, limit=100");

it sorted correctly as follows:

• AGLA, H
• AL, J
• AL, L
• BAILEY, M

 

So then I added a sort to ensure it lists by last_name:

$members = $pages->find("template=user, roles=member, limit=100, sort=last_name");

The resulting order looks like this:

• HALLS, T
• WEBSTER, T
• AGLA, H
• AL, J
• AL, L
• BAILEY, M

 

The obvious question is why is Halls and Webster coming before Agla? Can anyone explain it for me? I want to add a filter to allow sorting A-Z and Z-A so I need to include a sort in the selector but I need to get it to sort correctly first.

[Zeka]

@digitex

Are you sure that you don't have space character before H and W letters? 

[zoeck]

Processwire Sort using PHP "SORT_REGULAR", not "SORT_NATURAL"

If you have a string with a upper-case first character, and another one with lowercase first char, then theres a sorting Problem... ? 

Are your Items all upper-case or mixed?

Example:

- aSDF
- bSDF
- Bsdf

is sorted like this:

- Bsdf
- aSDF
- bSDF

[digitex]

14 hours ago, Zeka said:

@digitex

Are you sure that you don't have space character before H and W letters? 

That's the first thing I checked. I even cleared the field and re-entered the names manually. That's not it.

[digitex]

2 hours ago, zoeck said:

Processwire Sort using PHP "SORT_REGULAR", not "SORT_NATURAL"

If you have a string with a upper-case first character, and another one with lowercase first char, then theres a sorting Problem... ? 

Are your Items all upper-case or mixed?

No the last names are all uppercase. Members were imported from CSV and they were like that on import. It's good to know though.

I switched the selector to title instead of last_name and it sorted properly. The only difference I can see between the 2 fields is title is lowercase so I wrote a function to convert all the last_name values to title case and it seems to be working now.

I still think it's odd behaviour that uppercase should have sorting issues. Thanks to Zoeck for the insight.