Lexicographically ascending with index

[Amazon Books]

Hello, how can we retrieve the index values of the ascending sort data while performing a lexicographical ascend?
For example:

cat
ant
bat
elephant
dog

will get sorted as

ant
bat
cat
dog
elephant

but how to get the index values of this sort, i.e.

2
3
1
5
4

Thanks.

[Lycan Thrope]

@amazon-books
The same way you’s sort the word list. Using your list of numbers, I just sorted it Lexicographically Ascending as the screenshots show.

Using the Edit Menu:

And Viola:

Lee

[Amazon Books]

No, not like this.
The list is linguistic-only, made of words, not numbers.
‘Ant’ is at line#2, hence when the list of animals is sorted alphabetically, it rises to the top and occupies position#1. However, in the original list, its index-value was 2. How to recover this index value?
Similarly, the word ‘Dog’ was at line#5 before sorting. After sort, its position is at line#4. How to get the information that its original index-value was 5?
Here is the table of new versus old index-values of the given animal list:

new   old
1      2
2      3
3      1
4      5
5      4

How can we get this table? The list to be sorted is non-numerical, containing only words.

[Neil Schipper]

@amazon-books You can insert a column of ascending numbers to the right of your text. See Edit|Column Editor.

After sorting, you can use column select (Alt-mouse, or Alt-Shift-arrows) and cut, and perhaps Edit|Blank Operations|Trim Trailing to clean up.

What you’re trying to do is done much more naturally in a spreadsheet.

[Alan Kilborn]

@amazon-books

Elaborating on Neil’s reply:

Hold Alt while left-clicking on the first line, in the whitespace out to the far right (in a column number greater than the length of the longest line you are going to sort), and then drag down in the same column, to get a “selection” that looks like this:

Press Alt+c and set up the box that appears like this:

Press OK and your data will be transformed like this:

Do your sort to obtain:

[Amazon Books]

@alan-kilborn Many thanks.

[Amazon Books]

@neil-schipper Thanks.