sorting - THANK YOU PAUL!!

[Colin Holgate]

I tried Craig’s approach, but with the correct syntax, not the condensed example he gave. I put your example list into field 1, and had this script in a button:

on mouseUp
   put fld 1 into fld 2
   sort fld 2 by word 1 of each & word 2 of each
end mouseUp

I then scrambled (manually) the lines of field 1. That consistently gives back the list in the sorted order you showed.

Next I tried this script:

on mouseUp
   repeat with a = 1 to 100
      put item random(2) of "advanced,beginner" && random(100) into line a of fld 1
   end repeat
   put fld 1 into fld 2
   sort fld 2 by word 1 of each & word 2 of each
end mouseUp

Field 1 had a random list of advanced and beginner entries, with a level too, and after clicking the button field 2 showed the list as sorted.

Now, it’s an alpha sort not a numeric sort, and Paul’s approach, which was the same as Björnke’s, also fails in that way.

So, Craig’s suggestion was good, just not with the syntax expanded.