Question

I have seven columns and I would like to have them sort correctly,

The first column has numbers but it doesn’t order them the way I would like them to be ordered:

Example:
5016
502
5020
5023

where I would like it to sort like this:

Example:
502
5016
5020
5023

Now the 2nd column has a combination of numbers and letters
example is like above but has a letter in the front before each number
I would like to sort that by numbers, then by letters

Example:
441
B441
821
822
823
C823

or even like this would be OK

Example:
441
821
822
823
B441
C823

and finally,
the 3rd column is more complex it has a image before the words example is:
 Billy Jones
 Anna Walters
 Bob Smith
 Tom Henderson

All I want it to order by (names) letters…

Example:
<img src="img_tr122.png">&nbsp;Anna Walters
<img src="img_tr122.png">&nbsp;Billy Jones
<img src="img_tr122.png">&nbsp;Bob Smith
<img src="img_tr122.png">&nbsp;Tom Henderson

here is what I have in the JavaScript so far but I don’t know how to get everything to work..

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() { 
$.tablesorter.defaults.widgets = ['zebra']; 
    $("table").tablesorter({ 
        // pass the headers argument and assing a object 
        headers: { 
            // assign the third column (we start counting zero) 
            2: { 
                // disable sort because I don't know how to sort it correctly.
                sorter: false 
            },
            6: { 
                // disable sort for this (last) column because it is a menu only.
                sorter: false 
            } 
        } 
    }); 
});
</script>

PLEASE HELP….

THANKS!!!!

Answer 1

The original tablesorter (v2.0.5) doesn’t do alphanumeric sorting. But you can use my fork of tablesorter to sort your data using this code:

$('table').tablesorter({

    // Add a theme
    theme : 'blue',

    // extract text from the table
    textExtraction: {
        2: function(node) {
            // move swap first and last name
            return $.trim($(node).text() || '').replace(/(\w+)\s(\w+)/g,'$2 $1');
        }
    },

    // include zebra and any other widgets:
    widgets: ['zebra', 'columns']

});

I wasn’t sure how you wanted to sort the last column. The textExtraction option contains code to sort the last column by last name first. If you want to sort by the first name, then just remove the entire option.

Here is a demo of that code in action.