[FIXED] Sorting string column containing numbers and alphabets together in ascending order going by the numerical part in python

Issue

The table that i have is:

ID       Order_ID   Period
1234      2305333   Monthly
1234      4148915   Annual
1234      3136815   Monthly
1234      5309581   Monthly
9876      W~100040  Annual
9876      W~132759  Annual
9876      W~30094   Annual
9876      W~339658  Annual
9876      W~58943   Annual

We want this sorted on the basis of ID and Order such that the output looks like:

ID      Order_ID    Period
1234    2305333     Monthly
1234    3136815     Monthly
1234    4148915     Annual
1234    5309581     Monthly
9876    W~30094     Annual
9876    W~58943     Annual
9876    W~100040    Annual
9876    W~132759    Annual
9876    W~339658    Annual

What we essentially want is to be able to sort the Order_ID based on numerics even though we have both alphabets and numerics and we want to retain the column as it is.

We have tried using the code: df.loc[pd.to_numeric(df.Order_ID, errors='coerce').sort_values().index]

but are not getting the desired result.

Your help will be highly appreciated.

Solution

Use regex to extract the numeric part of the Order ID:

result = (
    df.assign(order_no=lambda x: x["Order_ID"].str.extract(".*?(\d+)").astype("int"))
    .sort_values(["ID", "order_no"])
    .drop(columns="order_no")
)

Answered By - Code Different