Converting Varchar Values to Numeric ?

[pwel]

Can anyone help?

I have a column of textual vales that i need to convert to numeric in order to sort them properly!

The values take the following form: 1.0, 10.0, 2.5, 100.0, 3.0 etc.

The values are required to be varchar's but I need to sort them as if the were numbers. As it stands, using an normal ORDER BY rsults in the following sort order.

1.0
10.0
100.0
2.5
3.0

But I need them to be sorted as if they were numbers i.e.

1.0
2.5
3.0
10.0
100.0

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers.
Paul.

 

[Spellman]

Hopefully something like this helps

SELECT CDBL(fieldname) AS Expr1
FROM tablename ORDER by CDBL(fieldname);