On Monday, February 19, 2018 06:23:27 AM Will Mengarini wrote: > * Ionel Mugurel Ciobica <i.m.ciob...@upcmail.nl> [18-02/18=Su 16:55 +0100]: > > [... How can something like > > "III\nII\nI\nV\nIV\nVII\nVI\nVIII\nX\nIX" > > [be sorted? ...] > > See `aptitude show msort`; it probably does what you need.
I'm not the OP, but, wow, thanks--looks like a very capable tool and sounds like it will work for some complex sorting that I was not looking forward to. For kicks, I did call up the msort change log, and found that it does deal with Roman numerals: See: http://www.billposer.org/Software/msort.html: <quote> 8.33 Numeric keys are no longer limited to the usual Indo-Arabic number system. Integers written in any of the following number systems are now accepted: Arabic, Arabic (South Asian), Bengali, Burmese, Chinese, Devanagari, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Ethiopic (Amharic and Tigrinya), Gujarati, Gurmukhi (Panjabi), Hebrew, Kannada, Klingon, Lao, Malayalam, Nko, Old Italic, Old Persian cuneiform, Oriya, Phoenician, Roman numerals, Tamil, Telugu, Tengwar, Thai, and Tibetan. The writing system for a key is specified by the -y flag. You may require a particular writing system, have msort autodetect the writing system but require all records to use the same writing system for that key, or have msort autodetect the writing system for each record independently. <\quote> For me, that is not (at all) an important feature, but the feature to sort using (retaining) units (records) of arbitrary length (number of lines / paragraphs) marked in some way (some sort of delimiter) is probably the key feature (along with picking an arbitrary sort field, which will not be in the first line of a record.)
