Stupid jQuery Table Sort

This is a stupid jQuery table sorting plugin. Nothing fancy, nothing really impressive. Overall, stupidly simple.

View the demo here

See the example.html document to see how to implement it.

Example Usage

The JS:

$("table").stupidtable();

The HTML:

<thead>
  <tr>
    <th class="type-int">int</th>
    <th class="type-float">float</th>
    <th class="type-string">string</th>
  </tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>15</td>
    <td>-.18</td>
    <td>banana</td>
  </tr>
  ...
  ...
  ...

Add a class of "type-DATATYPE" to the th's to make them sortable by that data type. If you don't want that column to be sortable, just don't give it a type-DATATYPE class.

Predefined data types

Our aim is to keep this plugin as lightweight as possible. Consequently, the only predefined datatypes that you can pass to the th's are

• int
• float
• string

These data types will be sufficient for many simple tables. However, if you need different data types for sorting, you can easily create your own!

Creating your own data types

Creating your own data type for sorting purposes is easy as long as you are comfortable using custom functions for sorting. Consult Mozilla's Docs if you're not.

Let's create an alphanum datatype for a User ID that takes strings in the form "D10", "A40", and sorts them based on the number.

<thead>
  <tr>
    <th class="type-string">Name</th>
    <th class="type-int">Age</th>
    <th class="type-alphanum">UserID</th>
  </tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>Joseph McCullough</td>
    <td>20</td>
    <td>D10</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Justin Edwards</td>
    <td>29</td>
    <td>A40</td>
  </tr>
  ...
  ...
  ...

Now we need to specify how the alphanum type will be sorted. To do that, we do the following:

$("table").stupidtable({
  "alphanum":function(a,b){

    var pattern = "^[A-Z](\\d+)$";
    var re = new RegExp(pattern);

    var aNum = re.exec(a).slice(1);
    var bNum = re.exec(b).slice(1);

    return parseInt(aNum,10) - parseInt(bNum,10);
  }
});

This extracts the integers from the cell and compares them in the style that sort functions use.