jquery datatable plugin doesn't seem to sort columns with links properly

Question

I have a column that was pure text and the sorting worked fine but when I change the column data to HTML regular links, the sorting seems quite random and broken. I couldn\

Answer 1

The way I resolved the column sort with links is to use server side processing. This sets the sort process on the server side code, where the sort is handled by SQL. The link is added to each row after the fact. The resultant returned to the client side displayed correctly. Otherwise, the answer by tvanfosson seems to work well.