For example, the numbers 10, 9, 70, 100 are sorted lexicographically as 10, 100, 70, 9. Numbers are sorted based on the first digit. In Splunk software, this is almost always UTF-8 encoding, which is a superset of ASCII. Lexicographical order sorts items based on the values used to encode the items in computer memory. This set of values are sorted lexicographically because the values are alphanumeric strings. This set of values are sorted numerically because the values are all numeric. This means that for some pairs of values, the order might be lexicographical, while for other pairs the order might be numerical.

The sort order is determined between each pair of values that are compared at any one time. Strings that are a combination of alphanumeric and punctuation characters are sorted the same way as alphanumeric strings.Otherwise, strings are sorted lexicographically. If the string starts with a number, the string is sorted numerically based on that number alone. Alphanumeric strings are sorted based on the data type of the first character.Numeric data is sorted as you would expect for numbers and the sort order is specified as ascending or descending.Punctuation strings are sorted lexicographically.Otherwise, the collating sequence is in lexicographical order. If the field contains IP address values, the collating sequence is for IP addresses. If the field contains numeric values, the collating sequence is numeric.

By default, the sort command tries to automatically determine what it is sorting.

Examples of splunk rex command