Re: Sorting on compound keys?

[Tim Landscheidt]

Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> wrote:

>> sometimes I want to sort unified diffs of CSV files (sepa-
>> rated by tabs (here: \t)):

>> | +A 1\t1\tx
>> | +A 1\t2\ty
>> | +B 2\t3\tz
>> | -A 1\t1\tx
>> | -B 2\t2\ty
>> | -B 2\t3\tz

>> by the second column, then the first column, then "+" vs.
>> "-". Unfortunately, it seems that sort-regexp-fields doesn't
>> allow more than one match field as a key. sort-fields
>> doesn't work either as it requires the fields to be sur-
>> rounded by white space (no "+" vs. "-") and doesn't allow
>> white space inside the fields.

>>    Is there any function in vanilla Emacs (23.1.1) that I
>> missed? I looked at pimping sort-regexp-fields, but it seems
>> to me that sort-subr would have to be rewritten from scratch
>> to achieve sorting on compound keys.

> last time I looked into that feature was missing indeed.
> However, didn't look for a need of re-write from the
> scratch, just to extend to existing routine - ie. introduce
> one or more levels of sorting.

I remember our discussion in de.comp.editoren :-), but as I
read sort-subr it is hard-coded that the sort key is one
literal, continuous part of the buffer as sort-lists is a
list of buffer positions.

Tim