Question

I have a table like this I’d like to sort :
| Name | Case |
| John | X-123/08 P|
| Bob | X-123/09 |
| Dylan | X-45/10 |

I want to sort the Case colum by case’s year then case’s number knowing that the format is always “X-(1 to 4 digits for case’s number)/(case’s year on 2 digits) (sometimes some text)”. It’s possible that after the year’s case I have some text but it shoud be ignored for sorting.

I am using tablesorter jQuery’s plugin and I am struggling to add a custom parser for this.

Thanks for your help !

EDIT : Here’s what I’m trying to do :

jQuery.tablesorter.addParser({ 
                // set a unique id 
                id: 'case', 
                is: function(s) { 
                    return false; 
                }, 
                format: function(s) { 
                    // format your data for normalization 
                    return s.replace(/^X-\d{1,4}\/(\d{2}).*$/, '$1') + ('000' + s.replace(/^X-(\d{1,4})\/\d{2}.*$/, '$1')).substr(-4);
                }, 
                // set type, either numeric or text 
                type: 'text'
            }); 

It’s working great until I encounter a case with 2 digits which is then ranked greater than a 3 digits one and I don’t understand why …
“X-458/09 P” is sorted smaller than “X-48/09” . I’ll try some debug to see what really happens.

EDIT 2 : Also tried the second answer :

jQuery.tablesorter.addParser({ 
                // set a unique id 
                id: 'case', 
                is: function(s) { 
                    return false; 
                }, 
                format: function(s) { 
                    var m = s.match(/X\-(\d+)\/(\d{2}).*$/);
                    var affaire = m[1];
                    var year = m[2];
                    return year + '000' + affaire;
                }, 
                // set type, either numeric or text 
                type: 'text'
            }); 

The result seems to be the same as the first one… I really can’t understand why it sucks. Why tablesorter thinks that 488 000 10 is smaller than 49 000 10 ?!

Answer 1

I think you can use:

$.tablesorter.addParser({ 
    // set a unique id 
    id: 'case', 
    is: function(s) { 
        // return false so this parser is not auto detected 
        return false; 
    }, 
    format: function(s) { 
        // format your data for normalization 
        return s.replace(/^X-\d{1,4}\/(\d{2}).*$/, '$1') + ('000' + s.replace(/^X-(\d{1,4})\/\d{2}.*$/, '$1')).slice(-4);
    }, 
    // set type, either numeric or text 
    type: 'text'
}); 

EDIT:

Maybe you already tried something like this with type: 'numeric'; I’m not sure, but this may fail because parseInt('09') === 0.

EDIT 2:

Changed to reflect sorting by year, then case number.