Forums Scripts & Popups Sorting a file

I have a text file with 2 columns of numbers. I used /filter to sort it by column 1. The thing is that a lot of the numbers in column 1 are the same. And for those lines that they are, I need to sort those lines by column 2 but still keep column 1 in the correct order. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Here is an example of my file:

7 684
5 286
3 5
3 113
3 1
2 174
2 189
2 187
2 198
2 0
1 78
1 5
1 5
1 5
1 5
1 5
1 32

How about sorting 2 files individually, for column 1 and column 2 and combining them? Or do I have the wrong idea here?

-Andy

Im not sure, the result im looking for is turning that list there into this:
7 684
5 286
3 113
3 5
3 1
2 198
2 189
2 187
2 174
2 0
1 78
1 32
1 5
1 5
1 5
1 5
1 5

Basically if the lines have the same number for colum 1, then sort those lines by colum 2. but keep the correct descending order for column 1. If that makes sense...

use an @window with the sort switch
/window -s @sort

then load in the values
/loadbuf @sort thetextfile.txt

then save the @window back to the text
/savebuf @sort thetextfile.txt



see if that works for you

I think that just sorts it in ascending order based on the first character.

the first character in each column I believe

You can use /filter's -a option, to specify a custom sorting alias. In your case, it would look like this:
Then to sort your file, you'd execute this

example....
/filter -ffca file.txt file.txt filteralias *

&



the -a option sorts by passing to the alias names "filteralias" the two lines being compared at that time, then i compare the first column resulting in +1 or -1 for less or greater than (reverse of < being -1 & > being +1 becuase u wanted descending sort), if there the same i move to the second column doing the same.


** I well say that should the list of numbers be really really big, it might be better to do it other ways such as create a temp window with some type of compound value, sort that and then rebuild a uncompounded resultset, but i think if u got say under 1000 lines this is likely the simplest and cleanest way.

[i]pfffttt querty beat me to posting, that well teach me for writing text at the bottom. :-)
Only thing my alias might have over his is mine well ignore if other values are also on the lines as well, i dont know if there ever would be or not tho.
I assume Querties alias is better than mine if there are not any extra values on the line (column3+ etc) as the shorter the alias the better as its called numerius times for the sorting process