Re: How to sort ignoring digits? (was: Contacts printing)

[Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.medina@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 03:42:33PM +0100, Rodolfo Medina wrote:

>> >> > In the documentation of `sort' I couldn't find the possibility of
>> >> > ignoring digits.  I have a document that contains names and phone
>> >> > numbers and I wish to sort it by names.  The `-k' option doesn't seem
>> >> > to help because names and numbers are not in definite fields.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> Here are a few lines from the file:
>> 
>> 3938269241 320192481 Stan Laurel
>> 3939424701 0815605311 Oliver Hardy
>> 800151611 800822051 Harpo Marx
>> ABC Travel 0111111111 33811111111
>> Acade;Paolo;;; 335111111 Paolo Acade
>> Acade;Pasquale;;; 335122211 Pasquale Acade
>> 
>> I wish it to be sorted by letters (i.e. by names) - and also eliminate those
>> ugly semicolons!



Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> writes:

> well the semicolons are easy:
>
> sed -i -e 's/^.*\; //' filename
>
> this (untested) should match any string at the beginning of a line
> endind with semi-colon/space and replace it with nothing. It will do
> it in place on the existing filename, so make a copy first, so you can
> confirm its behavior. 
>
> You need, in my opinion, to get this data into a more uniform format
> to do much with it. And you need to decide a couple of things. Do you
> want the numbers first or second. Do you want to sort on The whole
> name? the last name? how do you want to handle things like ABC Travel? 
>
> Also, are these lines representative of all the data? can you rely on
> the lines looking only like this and not having any other format?



Thanks for your reply.
All I want is to sort lines by letters ignoring digits.  It's amazing to me that
such a potent tool as `sort' can't do that!  Maybe some other tool?

Thanks
Rodolfo