Can someone please respond?

From: Srinivasan Narayanan <snaraya...@sapient.com>
Date: Monday, March 13, 2017 at 3:51 PM
To: "solr-user@lucene.apache.org" <solr-user@lucene.apache.org>
Subject: Alphanumeric sort with alphabets first


Hello SOLR experts,

I am new to SOLR and I am trying to do alphanumeric sort on string field(s). 
However, in my case, alphabets should come before numbers. I also have a large 
number of such fields (~2500), any of which can be alphanumerically sorted upon 
at runtime. I’ve explored below concepts in SOLR to arrive at a solution:

1)      Custom similarity plugin : far fetched, and probably not even 
applicable to my usecase

2)      Analyzer/tokenizer and regex magic to left pad number parts with 0s : 
two disadvantages – I believe this needs extra fields (copy) to be created 
which I cannot do (2500 more fields is too much) and this will still push 
numbers before alphabets

3)      Custom function (ValueSource) and regex magic to left pad numeric 
tokens with 0s, and invoke function for sorting only – a bit better than the 
previous one, but still numbers come before alphabets.

4)      Custom function (ValueSource) and regex magic to left pad numeric 
tokens with 0s, prefix numeric tokens with tilde (~), and invoke function for 
sorting only – this is where I stand right now. Very ugly, but it works. 
Because tilde has a very high ASCII value, it pushes numbers behind alphabets.
There should obviously be a better approach I am missing. Please help!

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