String comparison in Crystal Reports and Excel
Hi,
Can anyone please explain to me how Crystal Reports and Excel decide which is the greater of two text strings?
I would have thought that it would work like this:
a. compare character 1 of the two strings
b. If character 1 of both strings is identical, then compare character 2 of each string.
c. Continue until a non-identical pair of characters is found.
d. the string with the higher character is greater than the other one.
Take an example: Compare String 1 "ANTEATERS" to String 2 "AARDVARK"
Compare character 1 of the two strings
Both characters are identical ("A"), so compare character 2 of the two strings
N is greater than A so "ANTEATERS" is greater than "AARDVARK".
But....
In practice it isn't working that way, and I cannot figure out the logic these programs are using.
When I compare "C-" to "CA", Crystal Reports and Excel both tell me that "C-" is less than "CA".
But when I compare "C-W" to "CAB", Crystal Reports and Excel both tell me that "C-W" is greater than "CAB".
Can anyone explain to me how the programs are reaching this conclusion? Any help would be much appreciated!
Can anyone please explain to me how Crystal Reports and Excel decide which is the greater of two text strings?
I would have thought that it would work like this:
a. compare character 1 of the two strings
b. If character 1 of both strings is identical, then compare character 2 of each string.
c. Continue until a non-identical pair of characters is found.
d. the string with the higher character is greater than the other one.
Take an example: Compare String 1 "ANTEATERS" to String 2 "AARDVARK"
Compare character 1 of the two strings
Both characters are identical ("A"), so compare character 2 of the two strings
N is greater than A so "ANTEATERS" is greater than "AARDVARK".
But....
In practice it isn't working that way, and I cannot figure out the logic these programs are using.
When I compare "C-" to "CA", Crystal Reports and Excel both tell me that "C-" is less than "CA".
But when I compare "C-W" to "CAB", Crystal Reports and Excel both tell me that "C-W" is greater than "CAB".
Can anyone explain to me how the programs are reaching this conclusion? Any help would be much appreciated!
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Well I'll be dipped. It appears that Crystal ignores the hyphen in a similar way to Excel. I changed my formulas to replace the hyphens in my strings with a tilde, and sure enough the comparisons gave me the result I was expecting. My next question is why on Earth they arbitrarily decided to ignore hyphens and apostrophes, but that'll have to keep for another day.
Thanks for your help and your swift reply!