Algorithm to sort various data types

Conceptually, I would like to sort data of a single column of variant type, similar to how this is done in Excel:

Here we can see that Numbers are sorted before Strings before Booleans before Errors. So, I would like to have a function that works like this in SQL:

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY
  CASE WHEN type='number' THEN 0 WHEN type='string' THEN 1 /* ... */ END,
  SortFunction(variantData)

Here is what I’d like to accomplish:

• The SortFunction needs to return a value of a single data type, for example, a string, or a number, or a binary type.
• I am fine limiting the length of a text field in the function, if that is necessary (for example, if we have a string that is 10,000 characters, just limiting it to the first 100 characters).

Any programming language is fine, I’m more concerned just about a technique to accomplish this Excel-like sorting.

For a numeric field, we can keep it as-is, for a date/time-related field we can do a unix timestamp, but how would we do it for a string or binary data type?

>Solution :

Consider each element as byte array and apply the Comparator:

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Comparator;

public class SortAnyObjects {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Object[] arr = {1, 'c', '&', "z", "testing", "hello world", '文',
            'å'};

        byte[][] a = new byte[arr.length][];    // <---- The column is not initialized

        for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
            if (arr[i] instanceof Integer) {
                a[i] = String.valueOf((int) arr[i]).getBytes();
            }
            else if (arr[i] instanceof Character) {
                a[i] = String.valueOf((char) arr[i]).getBytes();
            }
            else {     // <---- Here expand your else condition as you expect the datatypes
                a[i] = ((String) arr[i]).getBytes();
            }
        }

        Arrays.sort(a, new Comparator<byte[]>() {
            @Override
            public int compare(
                final byte[] o1,
                final byte[] o2
            ) {
                if (o1 == null) {
                    return 1;
                }
                if (o2 == null) {
                    return -1;
                }
                if (o1 == o2) {
                    return 0;
                }

                if (o2.length > o1.length) {
                    return compare(o2, o1);
                }

                for (int i = 0; i < o1.length; i++) {
                    if (o1[i] == o2[i]) {
                        continue;
                    }
                    return Byte.compare(o1[i], o2[i]);
                }
                return 0;
            }
        });

        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(a));

        for (int i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
            System.out.println(new String(a[i]));
        }
    }

}