Forum:How to .. quickly permanently re-sort a very large table according to one column?

The page in question is on the Call of Duty wiki. The page and section in question are here: http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Callsigns#Titles

What is the most efficient way one may go about PERMANENTLY modifying the table to sort the contents by number instead of alphabetically by name? Instead of manually rearranging the code in the correct order, is there an automatic process that may speed it up? It would make future edits to this page much easier and faster if this can be done.

Thanks!

--Yamamoto114 07:13, November 28, 2009 (UTC)


 * Are you familiar with either AWK/GAWK or perl? Either one would make very short work of this.
 * First strip the newlines (\n)
 * replace |- with \n
 * use | as your field separator to read field values into an associative array indexed by your sort key
 * in an END block use a foreach loop to print the array contents in alphabetical order using wikitable markup
 * -- najevi 13:03, November 28, 2009 (UTC)