Question

I have a string like this:

var allString = "|AQW12|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW11|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW09|2|34|33|12|<br>";

Basically this is some sort of table where column names would be delimetered by | and <br> delimits the rows.

My question is how you would go to sort the allString by column 2 (i.e. AQW12, AQW11, etc),.

Thank you

Answer 1

quick solution, excuse the bad variable names:

var allString = "|AQW12|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW11|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW09|2|34|33|12|<br>";

var l1 = allString.split("<br>");
var l2 = l1.map( function(elem) { return elem.split("|"); } )
var l3 = l2.sort( function(a,b) { return a[1].localeCompare(b[1]); } )
var l4 = l3.map( function(elem) { return elem.join("|"); } );
var output = l4.join("<br>");
console.log(allString);
console.log(output);

output:

|AQW12|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW11|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW09|2|34|33|12|<br>
|AQW09|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW11|2|34|33|12|<br>|AQW12|2|34|33|12|<br>

the variable l3 contains the data in array form:

[ [ 'AQW09', '2', '34', '33', '12' ],
  [ 'AQW11', '2', '34', '33', '12' ],
  [ 'AQW12', '2', '34', '33', '12' ] ]

for comments on localCompare, refer to https://stackoverflow.com/a/2167619/1689451

of course, you could also use method chaining, if you like to show off 🙂

var output = allString.split("<br>")
  .map( function(elem) { return elem.split("|"); } )
  .sort( function(a,b) { return a[1].localeCompare(b[1]); } )
  .map( function(elem) { return elem.join("|"); } )
  .join("<br>");