Sort ignoring leading 'the'

deleelee

Is it possible to sort lines ignoring leading words like ‘the’ and ‘a’?

PeterJones

There is no builtin way of doing that. If you know the list of articles you want to skip, you could make a multistep process to do it:

Move The, An, A to the end of each line, after a special marker
FIND = (?i-s)^(\h*(?:The|An|A)\h)(.*)$
REPLACE = $2►$1
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression
Replace All
Sort
Move the end back to thh beginning:
FIND = (?i-s)^(.*)►(.*)$
REPLACE = $2$1
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression
Replace All

BEFORE:

Another Time
The Wheel of Time
A Wrinkle in Time
An Acceptible Time
These are the Times

AFTER:

An Acceptible Time
Another Time
These are the Times
The Wheel of Time
A Wrinkle in Time

You can add more to the list (?:The|An|A|Yet|Another|Here|...)

deleelee

@PeterJones said in Sort ignoring leading 'the':

@deleelee ,

There is no builtin way of doing that. If you know the list of articles you want to skip, you could make a multistep process to do it:

Move The, An, A to the end of each line, after a special marker
FIND = (?i-s)^(\h*(?:The|An|A)\h)(.*)$
REPLACE = $2►$1
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression
Replace All

Sort

Move the end back to thh beginning:
FIND = (?i-s)^(.*)►(.*)$
REPLACE = $2$1
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression
Replace All

BEFORE:
Another Time
The Wheel of Time
A Wrinkle in Time
An Acceptible Time
These are the Times
AFTER:
An Acceptible Time
Another Time
These are the Times
The Wheel of Time
A Wrinkle in Time
You can add more to the list (?:The|An|A|Yet|Another|Here|...)

Oh wow, thanks - perfect!!! I realise it’s not possible to create a macro for this but could it be done in a python script? Then I could create a button for it.

PeterJones

@deleelee said in Sort ignoring leading 'the':

I realise it’s not possible to create a macro for this but could it be done in a python script?

You can record that as a macro. There’s a whole section in the Online User Manual about the details of search/replace macros

And virtually anything you can do in Notepad++ can be run from PythonScript (though things like settings and interacting with some dialogs requires some behind the scenes hacking)

deleelee

This post is deleted!

deleelee

@PeterJones said in Sort ignoring leading 'the':

You can record that as a macro

Ooops sorry. I was basing that on a comment you made on a previous post of mine but I misunderstood part of it and thought you had said only search/replace could be recorded as macro. You had actually said the only ‘dialog-based action’ that could be recorded was a search/replace. I thought the sort in this instance would be problematic but it’s not a dialog. So I’ve created a macro and can now sort with ignore. Thanks again!!