'ORDER BY' in JQL on text Fields sorts by ASCII values causing upper and lowercase to be separated

Issue Summary

Noting in our documentation "Search syntax for text fields" we state:

Note: All query terms in Jira are not case sensitive.

However when using the 'ORDER BY' function on a text field the sorting appears to be using a ASCII sort function which causes the sorting of uppercase and lowercase letters separately and sort punctuation marks and symbols in various places between numerals and letters, for example, "Z" precedes "a"

A Reference to ASCII ordering can be found at:

• http://www.asciitable.com/

Using the order of character sets designed for computer sorting does not necessarily produce a sort sequence that is acceptable for human readable fields such as a text field where having values such as a,A,b,B,1,Z,# in the fields would be sorted as #,1,A,B,Z,a,b in ASCII so that the upper case A & B are separated from lowercase a & b where alphabetically the uppercase and lowercase letters should be grouped together.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create multiple issue adding one of these values in each issues Summary A, a, B, b, #, Z, 1, 2
2. In JQL search add in 'ORDER BY summary'

Expected Results

The issues are sorted with Alphanumeric sort order of Special characters then numbers, then letters: #, 1, 2, A, a, B, b, Z

Actual Results

Issues sorted by ASCII value priority #, 1, 2, A, B, Z, a, b

Note:

IN ASCII sort, the special characters for a dash "-" and underscore "_" occure between Uppercase and lowercase and are not grouped with other special characters causing an additional layer of confusion

Workaround

Currently there is no known workaround for this behavior. A workaround will be added here when available