Rather than killing yourself trying to get this done in Emacs, try creating a shell script that does the job. You can use <esc>| after selecting the region of your buffer to execute the shell script on.
-- Bill Morita 512-569-6387 (Cell) On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 9:21 AM Rich Shepard <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a file of data to import into a database table. Each row is enclosed > in parentheses and the first field/column is numeric; the table's PK. > > To check there are no duplicate rows I want to sort the numerically but > both > emac's M-x sort-numeric-fields and M-x sort-fields fail the task. > > The former should work but I see results such as: > (2241,3,... > (440,1,... > (441,1,... > (441,2,... > (441,3,... > (441,4,... > (441,5,,,, > (555,1,... > (504,1,... > (408,1,... > (408,2,... > (2243,1,... > and similar series of out-of-sequence rows. > > M-x sort-fields sorts digit-by-digit rather than group-by-group. > > Do I need to temprarily remove the opening parenthesis at the beginning of > the line for emacs to recognize the first field as numeric? > > Rich > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
