Gary Johnson wrote:
On 2007-01-05, Erlend Hamberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Friday 05 January 2007 15:47, striker wrote:
I have a text file in the format:
01/04/2007,field1,field2,field3
01/03/2007,field1,field2,field3
12/30/2006,field1,field2,field3
etc...
I need to sort by date, but the new dates in 2007 are placed first in
the sort algorithm. How can I sort by the entire date in the format
above?
:%sort n /\d\+\/\d\+/
To sort by the entire date, this needs to be a two-stage process.
First do an ordinary (not numeric) sort on the whole line:
:%sort
Then do a sort (numeric or ordinary) ignoring the month and day
fields, as Erlend suggested:
:%sort n /\d\+\/\d\+/
HTH,
Gary
There is no guarantee that lines with the same year would remain in the same
order (see the first non-indented paragraph under ":help :sort". They might
keep their previous sort sequence in a version of Vim compiled with one
compiler and run with one library, and not in a version at the same
patchlevel, but compiled with another cmpiler and run with another library.
IMO the only "safe" method consists in doing a single sort operation, possibly
with pre- and post- processing of sort keys. See my answer (and that of Tim
Chase) to the OP.
Best regards,
Tony.
