Sorting by text position in BBEdit - making in the best spreadsheet editor ever

[Allen Hancock]

I get a lot of tabular text data I need to edit on a regular basis.

Excel mungs the data, where BBEdit just works.

However, I frequently need to sort the lines by the second/third/etc column, as defined by tabs in between the columns.

I'm not much on grep, so if someone would help out with the following two situations, I would be grateful:

Given 3 columns of text with tabs in between, what grep pattern (I assume that's the best way to handle this) would select the first character after the 2nd tab?

112 000 PDQ

987 000 DEF

090 000 XYZ

678 000 ABC

would become

678 000 ABC

987 000 DEF

112 000 PDQ

090 000 XYZ

given a column of part numbers which all begin  000-, how could I sort on the 5th character?

000-XYZ

000-PDQ

000-ABC

000-DEF

would become

000-ABC

000-DEF

000-PDQ

000-XYZ

Thank so much in advance!

-Allen

[Rod Buchanan]

On Apr 23, 2012, at 9:43 PM, Allen Hancock wrote:

> Given 3 columns of text with tabs in between, what grep pattern (I assume that's the best way to handle this) would select the first character after the 2nd tab?
>
> 112 000 PDQ
> 987 000 DEF
> 090 000 XYZ
> 678 000 ABC
>
> would become
> 678 000 ABC
> 987 000 DEF
> 112 000 PDQ
> 090 000 XYZ

Use Text -> Sort Lines...

Check "Sort using pattern"
Searching pattern: ^(.+?)\t(.+?)\t(.+)
Sort using: Specific sub-patterns:
\3

--
Rod Buchanan
KDSI / Kelly Supply Co / ISCO
308 382-8764 x220

[LuKreme]

On Apr 23, 2012, at 20:43, Allen Hancock <al...@macconsultinggroup.com> wrote:
> Given 3 columns of text with tabs in between, what grep pattern (I assume that's the best way to handle this) would select the first character after the 2nd tab?

[^\t]*\t[^\t]*\t([^\t]*)

Sort on \1

Basically what you are saying is, I want any number of characters (*) that are not a tab ([^\t]) followed by a tab, twice. Then, I want you to grab the next set of characters that are not tabs into a buffer () and since that's the first buffer, it will be named \1. Now sort on that buffer.

[Allen Hancock]

Resurrecting this old thread of mine, what would the syntax be to sort by a specific column, regardless of content..

So, sort on column 8, etc.

Thanks all!

On Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 10:17:52 PM UTC, Lewis Butler wrote: