Sort ignoring leading 'the'

[deleelee]

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

[PeterJones]

@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:

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

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