Sort Unordered List with Javascript

Question

Hi,

I have been looking at the stackoverflow thread:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1134976/jquery-sort-list-items-alphabetically

but for my scenario, I have the hierachy:

<ul><li><a href="http://www.google.com.au"&gt;NAME_TO_SORT_ON&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;

Based on this set-up, how can I modify the solution from thread mentioned here to cater for my scenario which has a tag as I would like to sort on all the name found in NAME_TO_SORT_ON?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would recommend using a jQuery-based solution for this, because once you start getting into multiple DOM levels (e.g. sorting siblings at one level based on the contents of elements at a deeper level) the simple sort mechanism breaks down. It's an extremely rough solution - essentially blowing away the existing HTML and replacing it in raw text mode with other HTML. We can do better by actually shuffling the DOM elements around:

function sort(list, key) {
    $($(list).get().reverse()).each(function(outer) {
        var sorting = this;
        $($(list).get().reverse()).each(function(inner) {
            if($(key, this).text().localeCompare($(key, sorting).text()) > 0) {
                this.parentNode.insertBefore(sorting.parentNode.removeChild(sorting), this);
            }
        });
    });
}

To use it, we pass in a selector to the list and a selector to use to locate the key we want to sort on:

<ul class="toBeSorted">
    <li><a href="...">sort me</a></li>
</ul>

<script type="text/javascript">
    sort('ul.toBeSorted>li', 'a');

    //we want to sort the <li>'s in ul.toBeSorted;
    //and we want to use the text of the first and only <a>
    //in each item as the sort key
</script>