Sorting with Pythonista
August 3, 2013 at 9:10 PM by Dr. Drang
I saw this tweet from hiilppp yesterday:
Sort lines of text in @draftsapp w/ a little help from Pythonista: gist.github.com/hiilppp/6139407
— hiilppp (@hiilppp) Fri Aug 2 2013 8:49 AM CDT
I pretty much knew what to expect before I followed the link: a short, elegant Pythonista script that split the input on newlines, sorted the resulting list, joined the sorted list back into a series of lines, and sent the results back to Drafts. And that’s exactly what hiilppp had written.
It’s really a wonderful little script—the kind that makes you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself. It reminded me of a project from several years ago in which common Unix shell commands were reimplemented in Perl to make them available on non-Unix systems (which, unfortunately, I can’t find a link to). I can imagine Pythonista (via URL callbacks) serving the same purpose to filter text in Drafts.
But instead of writing a Pythonista version of uniq, I decided to take hiilppp’s elegant code and garble it up to handle a situation I run into fairly often: alphabetizing a list of names. Here’s the script I came up with:
python:
1: # To call script from Drafts, use the following URL as URL Action:
2: # <pythonista://namesort?action=run&argv=[[draft]]>
3:
4: import urllib
5: import webbrowser
6:
7: def lastname(s):
8: n = s.split()
9: if len(n) == 1:
10: return n
11: if n[-1] in ('Jr.', 'Sr.', 'I', 'II', 'III', 'IV', 'V'):
12: suffix = n[-1:]
13: firstnames = n[:-2]
14: if n[-2][-1] == ',':
15: return [n[-2][:-1]] + firstnames + suffix
16: else:
17: return [n[-2]] + firstnames + suffix
18: else:
19: firstnames = n[:-1]
20: return [n[-1]] + firstnames
21:
22: a = sys.argv[1].split("\n")
23: a.sort(key=lastname)
24: a = "\n".join(a)
25:
26: webbrowser.open("drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=" + urllib.quote(a))
It’s called namesort, and it’s called from Drafts using URL scheme shown in Line 2,
pythonista://namesort?action=run&argv=[[draft]]
which sends the current draft off to Pythonista for processing as the argument to the namesort script. After processing, a draft that looked like
Julian Lennon
Grover Washington, Jr.
George P. Bush
George Bush
John Lennon
Grover Washington
Cher
John Davison Rockefeller III
becomes
George Bush
George P. Bush
Cher
John Lennon
Julian Lennon
John Davison Rockefeller III
Grover Washington
Grover Washington, Jr.
As you can see, namesort handles one-word names, middle names and initials, and suffixes. The list of suffixes it knows about are in Line 11—you could extend that to others if you need to handle things like M.D. and Ph.D. It would also be easy to handle titles like Mr., Ms., and Dr., if needed. I never need those, so I kept the code as simple as I could.
One glaring deficiency in namesort is its inability to deal with compound surnames that aren’t hyphenated. So if I were alphabetizing the list of British Prime Ministers, namesort would put David Lloyd George before William Gladstone instead of after. Pity. I can’t think of a foolproof algorithm to handle this; there are just too many possible compound names. My kludgey workaround is to hyphenate the compounds before sorting and then dehyphenate them afterward.
The key (literally) to namesort is the lastname function, which takes a name and returns a list in the form [last, first, middle, suffix], where some of the items could be missing and there could be more than one middle. This function is fed to the sort command on Line 23 and determines how the items in list a are compared. The rules for comparing lists are given here—basically, they’re compared item by item.
I should turn this into a BBEdit text filter.
