Sorting datatables by length of string

Hi,

I've made a datatable which displays the amount of likes a user has.I live in Europe and really wanted to have thousands separators. I used toLocaleString() for this. What has happened is that the table now sorts all the data like a string instead of a number, which makes sense. I couldn't find any way to format a number like this, whilst remaining a number. Is there any way to sort a column depending on the length of a string? I’m looking forward to the replies :).

Code for adding the separators:

componentDidMount() {
    //The data to be used for the tables
    let transformedData = [...importData.influencers];
    const newData = transformedData.map(obj => {
      if (obj.influencerId)
        return {
          ...obj,
          totalLikes: (
            obj.totalLikes.toLocaleString()
          )
        };

      return obj;
    });
    this.setState({ tableData: newData });
  }

Code used for the table sorting:

 <MDBDataTable
                data={data}
                order={["totalLikes", "desc"]}
              />

Screenshot: