UNIX shell: sort a string by word length and by ASCII order ignoring case

awk, command-line, shell, sorting, unix

Solution

I wrote an ugly (maybe) `awk|sort|awk` line to do the job. it could be done in one awk process too, however, I am a bit lazy, just go to the dirty and quick way.

echo yourStr|awk '{
split($0,o); for(x in o) print length(o[x]),o[x]}'|sort -n|awk '!p{printf $2;p=$1;next}$1==p{printf " "$2}$1!=p{printf "\n"$2;p=$1}'

let's take an example:

"Hello stackoverflow how are you today foo bar xoo yoo ooo"

try with above line:

kent$  echo "Hello stackoverflow how are you today foo bar xoo yoo ooo"|awk '{
split($0,o); for(x in o) print length(o[x]),o[x]}'|sort -n|awk '!p{printf $2;p=$1;next}$1==p{printf " "$2}$1!=p{printf "\n"$2;p=$1}'
are bar foo how ooo xoo yoo you
Hello today
stackoverflow

test with your first example:

kent$  echo "A a b B cc ca cd" |awk '{
pipe quote> split($0,o); for(x in o) print length(o[x]),o[x]}'|sort -n|awk '!p{printf $2;p=$1;next}$1==p{printf " "$2}$1!=p{printf "\n"$2;p=$1}' 
a A b B
ca cc cd

Problem

I would like to sort a string by length and then by ASCII order(upper and lower case are equal) with a unix command. ``` string = [a-z][A-Z][0-9] ``` For example: ``` "A a b B cc ca cd" : => A a b B => ca cc cd "Hello stackoverflow how are you today" => are how you => Hello today => stackoverflow ```

Original source