-

Not sortable. This is the default.

X

Alphanumeric sorting, case-insensitive

U, L

Alphanumeric sorting, case-sensitive

9

Numeric sorting, leading sign and current decimal-point used, all other non-digit characters ignored

D, E

Date sorting. Assumes three integer fields separated by one or more non-digit characters. Integers are year, month and day. Two-digit years less than 30 are treated as year 20xx while other two-digit years are treated as year 19xx.

 

The default ordering of the fields is month, day, year if the current decimal point character is a point or period (.), otherwise the default ordering is day, month, year. You can explicitly specify the ordering by appending a three-character string enclosed by parenthesis, using Y, M and D to represent the year, month and day respectively. For example, D(DMY) is date order, with the date being in day-month-year order.

 

Only MDY, DMY and YMD are currently valid. Invalid format strings have undefined results.