do letters come before numbers in alphabetical order
Alphabetical order When some of the strings contain numerals (or other non-letter characters), various approaches are possible. Sometimes such characters are treated as if they came before or after all the letters of the alphabet. Another method is for numbers to be sorted alphabetically as they would be spelled: for example 1776 would be sorted as if spelled out "seventeen seventy-six", and 24 heures du Mans as if spelled "vingt-quatre..." (French for "twenty-four"). When numerals or other symbols are used as special graphical forms of letters, as 1337 for leet or the movie Seven (which was stylised as Se7en), they may be sorted as if they were those letters. Natural sort order orders strings alphabetically, except that multi-digit numbers are treated as a single character and ordered by the value of the number encoded by the digits.