BUG: Underscore sorts to the bottom of a list

I'm in the appian designer and I'm trying to sort my datasets by description.

Normally if you use an underscore "_" as the first character, entries with the "_" as its first character will appear at the top of the list when sorting alphabetically.

Not with Appian however 

Anything with an "_" as its first character sorts to the bottom of the list, not the top.

Example 

Any Name
Bny Name
Cny Name
_ny Name

Why? No one else seems to do it this way. I've worked with dozen of applications and none of them sort the "_" character last like this. 

Is this a bug or is Appian taking a page from MS' playbook and assumes that it knows better than everyone how sorting should work?

How can I fix this or find a work around? I don't want to resort to using 1, 2, 3... in order to force my descriptions to sort properly.

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  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer

    The ASCII character code for underscore is 95, whereas for the uppercase letters it's 65 - 90 (so, lower).  I assume Appian does a simple sort along these lines, and I personally wouldn't have any expectation that it do anything different unless otherwise specified.  Especially for a plaintext field like description.

    Also to confirm, I'd be curious whether underscore sorts *higher* than lowercase letters, since their ascii codes are higher(?)

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  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer

    The ASCII character code for underscore is 95, whereas for the uppercase letters it's 65 - 90 (so, lower).  I assume Appian does a simple sort along these lines, and I personally wouldn't have any expectation that it do anything different unless otherwise specified.  Especially for a plaintext field like description.

    Also to confirm, I'd be curious whether underscore sorts *higher* than lowercase letters, since their ascii codes are higher(?)

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