How to sort a list alphabetically but ignore numbers?

rollcast

I have a list of urls I need to sort but I need to sort them only using the letters in the url?

Eg.

example.com/174353/a
example.com/3452344/c
example.com/435322/d
example.com/2342/b
example.com/23456/e

Would be sorted as:

example.com/174353/a
example.com/2342/b
example.com/3452344/c
example.com/435322/d
example.com/23456/e

Thanks
AL

jedishrfu

if you process the file using the / as a separator then you can extract out the 3rd field to sort on.

you could probably use awk to do the parsing to write a new file containing the key then url on one line
then use the sort command to generate a sorted list.

thats if you're running on linux or some unix variant.

Nik_2213

Most varieties of BASIC have a Right$(,) function, which would read the closing letter(s) off the target string.

rollcast

I'm on Ubuntu 11.10.

The addresses aren't as simple as I thought here's one for example.

http:// www. flyforums. co.uk/fly-tying-step-step/160-beacon-beige.html

(The spaces are just there to stop it hyperlinking it.)

They all follow the same pattern with a number-couple of keywords separated by -s .html

jedishrfu

how about this python script

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/10115

rollcast

It comes up with an error,

" File "sort.py", line 3, in <module>
filename = sys.argv[1]
IndexError: list index out of range"

MisterX

Please clarify. Would the URL

http:// www. flyforums. co.uk/fly-tying-step-step/160-beacon-beige.html

be lexicographically sorted with the value

httpwwwflyformscoukflytryingstepstepbeaconbeigehtml

?

jedishrfu

when you run it you're supposed to provide a file of your urls to be sorted.

./sorturls.py myfileofurls.lst

where sorturls.py is the name of the script and the myfileofurls.lst is your file of unsorted urls.