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The way I write software, such values of user_select_sort would never even be possible... It's much slower to compare strings than to compare numbers, and passing long descriptive values that are actually booleans or short enums is just a waste of bandwidth (assuming they are passed as GET/POST variables).

Why not just pass numbers instead?

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Numbers or strings wasn't the point really. You can do 'order by 1' or 'order by 2' in SQL to order by the first or second selected col etc, but if you used used the number passed directly from the user in the SQL statement, you are open to SQL injection. Feel free to use the number in a case statement to select the order by string to concat into your SQL however.

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