ASCII Sort Order
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I have a need to sort lines in ASCII sort order. Is there a way to do this in Notepad++?
…leeNotepad++ v8.9 (64-bit)
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By “ASCII” sort, I am assuming you mean A-Z comes before a-z. If so, that is known as “lexicographical” sort, which is one of the many sorting options in the Edit > Line Operations menu
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@PeterJones, that much is true, but not true enough. ASCII sort order is the order in which the ASCII characters are coded from ASCII 32 (space) to ASCII 127 (~). This is the order I need:
! " # $ % & ’ ( ) * + , - . / digits : ; < = > ? @ ALPHA [ \ ] ^ _ ` alpha { | } ~…lee
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Lexicographical sorts by codepoint. Which, in your limited terminology, could be considred “ASCII”: technically, that’s only “ASCII” if you are still using 7-bit encoding… which you aren’t, and which hasn’t been really used since before the 80s (even in the 80s, when they still used the label “ASCII”, it was actually an 8-bit encoding which overlapped with ASCII for the first 128 codepoints)
So if I start with the random order of the characters that you showed in your list on the left of the image, then apply lexicographical sorting will result in the order on the left, which is exactly what you want.
It saddens me that you assumed my answer was wrong, before trying it yourself and seeing that yes, indeed, it did exactly what you wanted.
update: fixed the image: the first time, it copied your ’ as the smartquote
’instead of the ASCII', so it sorted later (because smart-single-quote has a later codepoint than any character from the ASCII set). I didn’t notice until after I’d posted that it put the smart ’ at the end of the list; that was caused by a limitation of the forum, not of Notepad++'s sorting
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