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From: Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Baby X is bor nagain
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2024 10:25:08 +0100
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On 18/06/2024 23:49, Keith Thompson wrote:
> Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> writes:
> [...]
>> And it didn't take long to get Python to sort the list alphabetically,
>> but there seemed no way in to the sort comparision function
>> itself. And I had to give up.
> 
> <OT>
> https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#sorted
> https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#list.sort
> </OT>
> 
key specifies a function of one argument that is used to extract a 
comparison key from each element in iterable (for example, 
key=str.lower). The default value is None (compare the elements directly).

You see the problem. I can sort on any field. I can sort alphaetically 
upwards and downwards. But I don't want to do that. I want to use a 
non-alphabetical comaprison function on two fields, and I need to 
specify that myself, because it's impossible that it is available 
anywhere. And that is to sort alphalbetically, except where the strings 
match except for an emedded "_L_" or "_D_" where the string wth the 
embedded "L" shoud be treated as closer to A than the string with the 
emebdded "_D_".

And I'm sure there is some way to achiev e this. But in C, it s achieved 
simply by declaring that qsort takes a function pointer to user-supplied 
code.

-- 
Check out my hobby project.
http://malcolmmclean.github.io/babyxrc