Could you please add numerical ordering by title to inline plugin? Now I can do only alphabetical order by title, but sometime it's not enough.

Implemented, see natural sorting --Joey

BTW, it seems that ordering by title is rather ordering by filename of page. For me "title" means title of page I can set using title parameter of meta plugin

Why do I need that feature? I've just been migrating an info site of our university mail system to Ikiwiki from very static, console handling Makefile+WML+XML+XSL=HTML solution. I have many news files (1.mdwn, 2.mdwn, etc.) and unfortunately I did very stupid thing. I've commited all of them in the same revision of our Subversion repo...

Now I have a problem with sorting these files using inline plugin. I can't do sorting by age, because both old and young news files have the same age. I can't sort by title too. For example, when I sort them by title, then 9.mdwn page is between 90.mdwn and 89.mdwn pages... It sucks, of course. Sorting by mtime also is not a solution for me, because it means that I can't touch/fix old news anymore.

Do you have any idea how to workaround that issue? --Paweł

Delete all files. Add files back one at a time, committing after adding each file. Sort by date. --Joey

The simplest solutions are the best Thanks for the hint! I didn't want to do it before, because I was affaid that my Subversion keeps old date of creation of file. --Paweł

Maybe you can rename 9.mdwn to 09.mdwn? See rename(1), it renames multiple files in one go. --?buo

Thanks for your suggestion! But what about if number of my news files grows to 100+?

$ ls
09.mdwn  100.mdwn  101.mdwn  102.mdwn  89.mdwn  90.mdwn

I don't want to rename all previous files to add 0 prefix. --Paweł

Rather than adding 0's or or a 'sorttype' parameter, I'd just fix the sort order. Both MacOS and Windows use a smarter sort order than just lexical in their file browsers (e.g. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=319827, http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300989).

The Unicode Collation algorithm would seem to be a reasonable sort order. (See also http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr10/.) Unfortunately the standard perl implementation, Unicode::Collate doesn't handle the optional numbers extension which is what you want. --Will

---

Below is my simple patch. Feel free to use it or comment!

I have also 2 considerations for inline sorting:

1. Maybe changing name of sort parameter to sortby or sortkey will be good idea?

   No, that would break existing wikis. --Joey

   It's no problem. You just have ikiwiki-transition utility --Paweł

2. Maybe you should use title sort key for title from meta plugin and name, filename, page or pagename for page names? In the future you can also sort by meta author, license or another key.

   There are many places in ikiwiki that do not use meta title info and could. I'd prefer to deal with that issue as a whole, not here, --Joey

--Paweł

--- inline.pm-orig  2008-09-02 09:53:20.000000000 +0200
+++ inline.pm       2008-09-02 10:09:02.000000000 +0200
@@ -186,7 +186,15 @@
    }

    if (exists $params{sort} && $params{sort} eq 'title') {
-           @list=sort { pagetitle(basename($a)) cmp pagetitle(basename($b)) } @list;
+           if (! $params{sorttype} || $params{sorttype} eq 'lexical') {
+                   @list=sort { pagetitle(basename($a)) cmp pagetitle(basename($b)) } @list;
+           }
+           elsif ($params{sorttype} eq 'numeric') {
+                   @list=sort { pagetitle(basename($a)) <=> pagetitle(basename($b)) } @list;
+           }
+           else {
+                   return sprintf(gettext("unknown sort type %s"), $params{sorttype});
+           }
    }
    elsif (exists $params{sort} && $params{sort} eq 'mtime') {
            @list=sort { $pagemtime{$b} <=> $pagemtime{$a} } @list;
@@ -195,7 +203,7 @@
            @list=sort { $pagectime{$b} <=> $pagectime{$a} } @list;
    }
    else {
-           return sprintf(gettext("unknown sort type %s"), $params{sort});
+           return sprintf(gettext("unknown sort key %s"), $params{sort});
    }

    if (yesno($params{reverse})) {

To users, "sort" already determines the type of sort. It can be by title, or by date, etc. Adding a separate "sorttype" value is thus fairly confusing. --Joey

OK. I will be more careful when I play with inline plugin --Paweł

---

Joey, have you forgotten about that request? --Paweł

Okie. Here is a different patch based on my comment above. It doesn't introduce a new key, but rather changes the title sorting order. Two caveats:

• I've only tested this in inline, not the other places I changed the sort order.
• I'm unsure if the regexp used in the split should be /(-?\d+)/ instead of /(\d+)/. As written, '-' is interpreted as a hyphen rather than a minus sign.

--Will

I"m not comfortable with tossing out perl's default collator and trying to maintain some other one going forward. Especially not for such an edge case. --Joey

Hi Will! Your idea looks interesting for me, but I'm affraid that it's too big change in Ikiwiki... Maybe I'm wrong? What do you think, Joey? --Paweł

It isn't that big a change. It is just supplying a sort order to the sort. The patch is a little larger because I then went through and made that sort order available in other places where it makes sense. (Looking at the patch again briefly, I should have also used it in the map plugin.)

If you wanted a simple patch, you could just move the titlecmp function into the inline plugin and only use it there. The problem with that is that it only fixes the inline plugin. -- Will

Will, I agree with you that it's improved way of sort order. But on the other hand I prefer to be careful when I change something in a several places, because I don't want to break any working things when I fix one thing. I hope that Joey agree with us too and all Ikiwiki users will be happy after applying your patch --Paweł

---

diff --git a/IkiWiki.pm b/IkiWiki.pm
index c0f5dea..d001f8d 100644
--- a/IkiWiki.pm
+++ b/IkiWiki.pm
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ use Exporter q{import};
 our @EXPORT = qw(hook debug error template htmlpage add_depends pagespec_match
                  bestlink htmllink readfile writefile pagetype srcfile pagename
                  displaytime will_render gettext urlto targetpage
-        add_underlay
+        add_underlay titlecmp
                  %config %links %pagestate %renderedfiles
                  %pagesources %destsources);
 our $VERSION = 2.00; # plugin interface version, next is ikiwiki version
@@ -835,6 +835,42 @@ sub titlepage ($) {
    return $title;
 }

+sub titlecmp ($$) {
+   my $titleA=shift;
+   my $titleB=shift;
+   
+   my @listA=split(/(\d+)/,$titleA);
+   my @listB=split(/(\d+)/,$titleB);
+   
+   while (@listA && @listB) {
+       # compare bits of text
+       my $a = shift @listA;
+       my $b = shift @listB;
+       my $c = ($a cmp $b);
+       return $c if ($c);
+
+       if (@listA && @listB) {
+           # compare numbers
+           $a = shift @listA;
+           $b = shift @listB;
+           $c = $a <=> $b;
+           return $c if ($c);
+           
+           # 01 is different to 1
+           $c = (length($a) <=> length($b));
+           return $c if ($c);
+
+           $c = ($a cmp $b);
+           return $c if ($c);
+       }
+   }
+   
+   return 1 if (@listA);
+   return -1 if (@listB);
+   
+   return 0;
+}
+
 sub linkpage ($) {
    my $link=shift;
    my $chars = defined $config{wiki_file_chars} ? $config{wiki_file_chars} : "-[:alnum:]+/.:_";
diff --git a/IkiWiki/Plugin/brokenlinks.pm b/IkiWiki/Plugin/brokenlinks.pm
index 37752dd..ccaa399 100644
--- a/IkiWiki/Plugin/brokenlinks.pm
+++ b/IkiWiki/Plugin/brokenlinks.pm
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ sub preprocess (@) {
            map {
                "<li>$_</li>"
            }
-           sort @broken)
+           sort titlecmp @broken)
        ."</ul>\n";
 }

diff --git a/IkiWiki/Plugin/inline.pm b/IkiWiki/Plugin/inline.pm
index 8efef3f..263e7a6 100644
--- a/IkiWiki/Plugin/inline.pm
+++ b/IkiWiki/Plugin/inline.pm
@@ -192,7 +192,7 @@ sub preprocess_inline (@) {
    }

    if (exists $params{sort} && $params{sort} eq 'title') {
-       @list=sort { pagetitle(basename($a)) cmp pagetitle(basename($b)) } @list;
+       @list=sort { titlecmp(pagetitle(basename($a)),pagetitle(basename($b))) } @list;
    }
    elsif (exists $params{sort} && $params{sort} eq 'mtime') {
        @list=sort { $pagemtime{$b} <=> $pagemtime{$a} } @list;
diff --git a/IkiWiki/Plugin/orphans.pm b/IkiWiki/Plugin/orphans.pm
index b910758..10a1d87 100644
--- a/IkiWiki/Plugin/orphans.pm
+++ b/IkiWiki/Plugin/orphans.pm
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ sub preprocess (@) {
                htmllink($params{page}, $params{destpage}, $_,
                     noimageinline => 1).
                "</li>"
-           } sort @orphans).
+           } sort titlecmp @orphans).
        "</ul>\n";
 }

diff --git a/IkiWiki/Render.pm b/IkiWiki/Render.pm
index ceb7c84..00798e1 100644
--- a/IkiWiki/Render.pm
+++ b/IkiWiki/Render.pm
@@ -89,7 +89,7 @@ sub genpage ($$) {
        $template->param(have_actions => 1);
    }

-   my @backlinks=sort { $a->{page} cmp $b->{page} } backlinks($page);
+   my @backlinks=sort { titlecmp($a->{page}, $b->{page}) } backlinks($page);
    my ($backlinks, $more_backlinks);
    if (@backlinks <= $config{numbacklinks} || ! $config{numbacklinks}) {
        $backlinks=\@backlinks;