Re: Sorting on compound keys?

[Mark Tilford]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Tim Landscheidt <tim@tim-landscheidt.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 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.
>
> Tim

Is there an option to do a stable sort, such as mergesort?