Topic: Anybody have some easy sorting routines?

[ifncdylan]

Hey all, I've had a bit of a look around but I can't find a good set of routines for sorting collections - in this case, I have a collection of blocks and I want to sort them numerically by an attribute.

Essentially I just want to run a function like (sortby '(lambda (a b) ((LM:vl-getattributevalue a "NAME") > (LM:vl-getattributevalue b "NAME")) ListOfBlocks) but I can't seem to get one working like that. I've been away from LISP for a while...feeling rusty! Can anyone help oil my gears?

[ronjonp]

Use vl-sort 😀

[ifncdylan]

rather counterintuitively, vl-sort doesn't work on visual lisp collections

[ronjonp]

If you're using lisp why are you not sorting lists? It's quite easy  .

Code - Auto/Visual Lisp: [Select]

1. (mapcar
2.   'cdr
3.   (vl-sort
4.     (mapcar (function (lambda (x) (cons (atof (lm:vl-getattributevalue x "NAME"))) x)) listofblocks)
5.     (function (lambda (a b) (< (car a) (car b))))
6.   )
7. )

[Lee Mac]

Alternatively, using vl-sort-i:

Code - Auto/Visual Lisp: [Select]

1. (mapcar
2.    '(lambda ( n ) (nth n listofblocks))
3.     (vl-sort-i (mapcar '(lambda ( b ) (atof (lm:vl-getattributevalue b "NAME"))) listofblocks) '<)
4. )

[ifncdylan]

Oh god.. thanks guys! I just realized again how amazing the mapcar/lambda combo is. I was starting to make really extensive use of it for processing the visual lisp objects before, but I completely forgot about it. I just need to really wrap my head around vlax-map-collection and vlax-put/get-property in conjunction with mapcar/lambda and the world will be all right again

The boss sprung a bunch of code jobs on me out of nowhere and I was struggling to get back into the groove. These examples have certainly inspired me again! Reminds me, I have some code I wrote for regex matching, I might post it in another thread and see if you legends can improve on it.