Sorting numbers with "thousand" separators

[sauy7]

I have a table that displays numbers with spaces as thousand separators
e.g., 2 300.

When sorting these columns, the values are treated as strings not numbers, so an ascending sort might look something like:

2
2 300
3
4

instead of:

2
3
4
2 300

In my case I can workaround this by changing the regexs in the sortByColumn method by adding spaces:

/$|%|#/g

becomes:

/$|%|#| /g

For a more I18n compliant solution however, other possible thousand separators should be supported (typically "," US and "." FR). The difficulty here is that decimal separators, typically "." or "," could also be removed and mess up the values.

I'd therefore suggest making additional configuration options so that the regex can be customised.

[nuxy]

I have updated Tidy-Table to include an optional configuration callback that will allow you to pre-process column values before sort() is executed. This approach is a little bit more flexible than just defining a Regular Expression since you can now process values using a complex algorithm (see below).

A simple example of use:

var config = {
    sortByPattern : function(col_num, val) {
        return String(val).replace(/$|%|#/g,'');    // note: this is the default behavior
    }
};

A more complex example:

var config = {
    sortByPattern : function(col_num, val) {
        var str = String(val);

        // process select column values
        switch (col_num) {
            case 0 :
                return str.replace(/^0+/,'');   // remove leading zeros
            break;
            case 1 :
                return str.replace(/%$/,'');    // remove trailing %
            break;
            case 2 :
                str = str.replace(/^\$/,'');    // remove leading $
                return str.replace(/,/g,'');    // remove commas
            break;
        }

        return str;
    }
};

The current changes have been committed to the (updates) branch. I intend on merging this with (master) once testing across the various web browsers is complete - likely in a couple days.

[nuxy]

The changes have been merged and a new tag created.

Closing this ticket.