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[MusicHawk]

Sorting in views allows ignoring of leading text specified as articles, and the list of strings to be ignored can be edited, very helpful. But there are song titles (and perhaps other fields) that still don't sort ideally. It would be a big help to do a bit more, such as:

Ignore any specified leading characters, mainly punctuation, such as apostrophe, quotation mark, and parentheses opening bracket. I can get this to work to ignore a leading apostrophe/single quotation mark, but not a paren character.

And, when MC ignores specific articles/leading text, the result sometimes will not sort as desired because the very next character/word might throw off the sort order. So, perhaps allow recursive processing, to properly sort a song title like this: The 'In' Crowd. Currently, "The" can be ignored, but then 'In' Crowd which sorts at top due to starting with a quotation mark rather than the word "In". Other examples include Everly Brothers hit ('Til) I Kissed You.

I realize that aren't a massive number of such odd songs, and a simple workaround is to alter the original punctuation, but perhaps there's a broader MC tweak that would not requiring changing the actual data. (Or, am I overlooking a way to do this?)

IDEAL SOLUTION: Do as books do, ignore all the punctuation and leading articles when ordering text such as titles/names. Just strip them out of the field's index. There are standards for doing this (NISO's major standard is cited in a reply to this.)

I suppose this behavior, aligning MC with a widespread sorting method, should be optional, ideally per-field though a global setting would likely be acceptable.

A while back I persuaded the developer to do this in a leading app that manages sheet music, because so many songs have quirky titles/punctuation. It has been a popular improvement. The same option would be wonderful in MC.

[221bBS]

You can edit the list in
Options > Tree & View > Sorting > Articles

[MusicHawk]

Thanks, but I said this in first sentence of my post. Long ago I tweaked the list and gotten some distance to the desired outcome. But experimenting again with MC22, this only works for some punctuation characters, not all of them that occur in song titles and other text. And not being recursive, it can only help sort some Name strings.

It was probably never intended to handle anything but leading text articles/words, but given how sorting is done in books, quite a few databases, and many apps, it would be very helpful for MC to allow sorting that ignores both articles and punctuation.

[blgentry]

I think I understand exactly what you are asking for.  The right solution (for you) is for the developers to implement what you've asked for.  I hope it's easy and they decide to do it.

However, if they don't do it for you, you could probably get very very close to what you want with a custom field used for sorting.  All you'd really need to do is define a calculated field like [Name Sort] for example.  Then make that field calculated data and develop an expression that removes the characters you don't want to be included in sorts.  So something sort of like:

replace([name],",)

That would remove the double quote character from your custom sort field.  You can nest these to remove any characters you want.  Though you might have to do some escaping depending on the character you are working with.  This would definitely involve some experimentation.  But you could probably get a lot done in an hour of messing with it.

Good luck. 

Brian.

[MusicHawk]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've used expressions to remove characters, and my MC libraries use several custom fields. So yes, that's a way to do it. But I think MC should do it.

MC falls just a bit short of the common standard text sorting used in book indexes, tables of contents, encyclopedias, directories, reference books, dictionaries, etc.

Because MC already goes some distance toward this, perhaps Matt and team will round it out with the full solution.

Over the years I've encountered a variety of database apps (and coded a few) that do this dynamically, as MC does somewhat. Not a new idea, of course, before it was done with code, it was done manually with parallel fields, the original value, and the sort value.

[MusicHawk]

There are official text sorting standards to consider. But I have not located a standard that matches what MC does, and it does not sort in any of the ways used by my reference books, dictionaries, Whitburn record books, sheet music song listings, etc. Therefore, I am suggesting that MC adjust its sorting to not just drop leading articles, but to sort based on a major standard.

This one is widely used and recommended, from NISO:
http://www.niso.org/publications/tr/tr03.pdf

NISO -- The National Information Standards Organization is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop and maintain technical standards for libraries, information services, and publishers.

National Information Standards Organization
4733 Bethesda Avenue, Suite 300
Bethesda, MD 20814-5248
Telephone: 301-654-2512
Fax: 301-654-1721
nisohq@niso.org
nisopress@niso.org
www.niso.org