Re: TIL about string-rectangle

[Yuri Khan]

On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 at 05:13, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

> > For complex sorts, I once wrote a function that enhances
> > sort-regexp-fields (and needs a docstring and comments that
> > I could understand after eight years): ...
>
> Thanks. I've used the Unix sort(1) command for a few decades now. It's
> kind of burned into my brain. I know Emacs Lisp is exceedingly
> powerful (I used it as my Lisp interpreter as the one and only Lisp
> class I took), but sort(1) does just what I wanted here other than not
> terminating the third (year) field at the comma. It's kind of hard to
> argue with its economy. Regular expressions are quite handy, but also
> pretty verbose for this task.

You will have an easier time sorting by date if you keep dates in the
ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DD.