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Bug#321022: ITP: msort -- utility for sorting records in complex ways



Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo <fenio@debian.org>

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* Package name    : msort
  Version         : 8.4
  Upstream Author : William J. Poser <billposer@alum.mit.edu>
* URL             : http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wjposer/msort.html
* License         : GPL
  Description     : utility for sorting records in complex ways

msort is a program for sorting files in sophisticated ways. It was originally 
developed for alphabetizing dictionaries of "exotic" languages, for which it 
has been extensively used, but is useful for many other purposes. msort differs
from typical sort utilities in providing greater flexibility in parsing the 
input into records and identifying key fields and greater control over the 
sort order. Its main distinctive features are:

* Msort can be used as a command-line program or via a graphical user interface
  that is helpful not only to those who find a complicated command line 
  difficult to deal with but also to those unfamiliar with the finer points 
  of sorting.
* Records need not be single lines of text but may be delimited in a number 
  of ways.
* Key fields may be selected either by position in the record (counting 
  from the beginning or the end) or by matching a regular expression to a tag.
* For each key an arbitrary sort order may be specified.
* For each key an effectively unlimited number of multigraphs (sequences 
  of characters to be treated as a single unit for purposes of sorting) of 
  effectively unlimited length may be defined.
* In addition to the usual lexicographic and numerical orderings, msort 
  supports sorting by date, time, and string length.
* For each key a distinct set of characters may be excluded from consideration 
  when sorting in any combination of initial, final, and medial position 
  in the key field.
* Lexicographic keys may be reversed, allowing the construction of reverse 
  dictionaries.
* Any or all keys may be optional. For optional keys, the user may specify 
  how records missing the key field should compare to records in which the 
  key field is present.

msort understands UTF-8 Unicode. Unicode may be used anywhere that text is 
entered: in the text to be sorted, in sort order and exclusion definitions, 
as a field or record separator, or as a field tag.


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