The SciTE editor comes with embedded Lua scripting engine having access to the text buffer of the editor. This makes it possible to extend SciTE's functionality with tools programmed in Lua and started from the Tools Menu. One such tool available from here:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/SciteSortSelection
is a tool for sorting of selected lines in alphabetical order. Annoying for me was/is that it doesn't sort lines containing numbers in their numerical order but like this:
1
111
2
222
3
333
where I would rather expect:
1
2
3
111
222
333
Google and Co. are not of much help here as there is to my knowledge no solution to this problem available yet online. It is also not that easy to find and deeply understand the Lua documentation for table.sort(). So the question for a knowledgeable Lua programmer would be, what is the best way to patch the existing Lua script code, so that numbers (and also lines with text in case of leading spaces) become sorted as expected and the Lua code for this task runs so fast, that even sorting of huge files (50 MByte and more) won't take much time?
Your expectation is wrong. You said the algorithm is supposed to sort the texts alphabetically and that is exactly what it does.
For Lua "11" is smaller than "2". I think you would agree that "aa" should come befor "b" which is pretty much the same thing.
If you want to change how texts are sorted you have to provide your own function.
The Lua reference manual says:
table.sort (list [, comp])
Sorts list elements in a given order, in-place, from list[1] to list[#list]. If comp is given, then it must be a function that receives two list elements and returns true when the first element must come before the second in the final order (so that, after the sort, i < j implies not comp(list[j],list[i])). If comp is not given, then the standard Lua operator < is used instead.
Note that the comp function must define a strict partial order over the elements in the list; that is, it must be asymmetric and transitive. Otherwise, no valid sort may be possible.
The sort algorithm is not stable: elements considered equal by the given order may have their relative positions changed by the sort.
So you are free to implement your own comp function to change the sorting.
By default table.sort(list) sort list in ascending order.
To make it sort in descending order you call:
table.sort(list, function(a,b) return a > b end)
If you want to treat numbers differently you can do something like this:
t = {"111", "11", "3", "2", "a", "b"}
local function myCompare(a,b)
local a_number = tonumber(a)
local b_number = tonumber(b)
if a_number and b_number then
return a_number < b_number
end
end
table.sort(t, myCompare)
for i,v in ipairs(t) do
print(v)
end
which would give you the output
2
3
11
111
a
b
Of course this is just a quick and simple example. A nicer implementation is up to you.