An apparatus, system, and method are disclosed for sorting character representations of data under the present invention, a character-encoded sort data value is identified in a data line of a data set. The sort data value is a character encoding of a predefined numbering system such as hexadecimal or binary encoding. The sort data value is then converted to a predefined encoding scheme and the data set is sorted based on the converted sort data value. A cycle number may be appended to the sort data value to maintain the order of the sort data values when the sort data values wrap. One embodiment identifies and removes delimiters such as titles from the data set and are inserted into the sorted data set.