Command: sortid

Syntax

sortid <ident>

Description

Sort the contents of an identifier array.

Parameters

• <ident>
  The name of the array to be sorted. This should be an array of type string, numeric, time, window, channel or layer.

Switches

• -d
  Sort in descending order. The default is ascending order.

• -dup
  Allow duplicate entries during the sort. This is the default behavior. Use the switch -no_dup to eliminate duplicate entries.

• -n
  For string sorts, evaluate numbers within values before sorting. Without this switch "test12" precedes "test4" because "1" is lexically less than "4". With this switch "test4" precedes "test12" because 4 is numerically less than 12.

• -on=<ident>
  Record the sort order in a numeric array. If <ident> does not exist it will be created using current scope rules.

• -u
  For string sorts, treat upper and lower case characters as different. The default behavior is to ignore case differences.

• -upd
  Update the array parameter with the result of the sort. This is the default behavior. Use the switches -no_upd and -on to compute the sort order without changing the original array.

• -z
  Eliminate null values from the result. The default behavior is to allow null values. A null string is an empty string. A null numeric is the value 0.

Examples

Sort a string array ss in ascending order.

string ss[] = <'Albania','Detroit','Chard','Botulism'>
sortid ss

Sort a string array ss into descending order, removing empty elements. A numeric array ord will be created and will contain the values: 2,4,5,1.

string ss[] = <'A', 'D', '', 'C', 'B'>
sortid ss,-d,-z,-on=ord

See Also