Sorting alpha lists wierdness

Hi everyone,
I'm writing a utility to clean up emails and I need to sort a list of up to about 40000 items.

At first I tried putting these items in a sorted listbox this worked well, but then I noticed the list was like this:

AB
AB
AB
ab
ab
ab
AB
ABC
etc..

Where uppercase/lowercase of the same characters were mixed together. I did a bubble sort which corrects this but is super slow. I did a shell sort and quick sort and it is very fast but sorts similarly to the listbox sort. (upper and lower mixed)

I trimmed the strings before putting them in an array, so they are all of the same length.

What am I doing wrong?

thanks for your help!
m.

If you put a UCase or an LCase on the List1.Additem entry as you were adding it, then when they got to your listbox that issue would not be present.

Hey Hack,
That does work, but I need the data in the original format.

I stumbled on the solution.

Here's what I'm doing
1) place unsorted data in an array
2) sort the array (using bubblesort or other)
3) place array elements in a list box

If the listbox has sorted = true it sorts as I stated above. If sorted = false they are sorted perfectly. I have no idea why this would be, I assumed the sort routines were to blame, they worked perfectly.

It would be cool if someone could explain why this works this way, but I got by the problem....
m.