You can define your own collation function which does whatever you like. <https://sqlite.org/c3ref/create_collation.html> Call it, presumably, 'NORMAL'. If you do this, you might want to make sure it can cope with triplets like this: book11page8 book3page4 book11page17 floor2room16b floor1room7 floor2room16 16.52.124.48 82.42.52.145 127.0.0.1 and not just digits at the end of the string.