Required arguments

Optional arguments

How data is interpreted and sorted

• Punctuation strings are sorted lexicographically.
• Numeric data is sorted as you would expect for numbers and the sort order is specified as ascending or descending.
• Alphanumeric strings are sorted based on the data type of the first character. If the string starts with a number, the string is sorted numerically based on that number alone. Otherwise, strings are sorted lexicographically.
• Strings that are a combination of alphanumeric and punctuation characters are sorted the same way as alphanumeric strings.

The sort order is determined between each pair of values that are compared at any one time. This means that for some pairs of values, the order might be lexicographical, while for other pairs the order might be numerical.

Lexicographical order

Lexicographical order sorts items based on the values used to encode the items in computer memory. In Splunk software, this is almost always UTF-8 encoding, which is a superset of ASCII.

• Numbers are sorted before letters. Numbers are sorted based on the first digit. For example, the numbers 10, 9, 70, 100 are sorted lexicographically as 10, 100, 70, 9.
• Uppercase letters are sorted before lowercase letters.
• Symbols are not standard. Some symbols are sorted before numeric values. Other symbols are sorted before or after letters.

You can specify a custom sort order that overrides the lexicographical order. See the blog Order Up! Custom Sort Orders.

Differences between SPL and SPL2

The differences between the SPL and SPL2 sort command are described in these sections.

Some field names require single quotation marks

Field names that contain anything other than [a-z][A-Z][0-9] or "_", need single quotation marks. In this example the field name is host-123 and because it contains a dash, it must be enclosed in single quotation marks.