I would have liked to lean towards a map sort map option but i can't think of how i would handle criteria #3 with that solution.

#3 is the rule where differently-formatted lines (i.e., not conforming to the spec) come after all other lines, and are sorted alphabetically.

To handle these, you could do two passes, and append the differently formatted output to the other output. Actually, I prefer to separate the code for handling the two cases, since conceptually you may need to treat them quite differently.

Also, if they're in a different formats, your specs for the sort may diverge more in the future, so any combined sort would have to be split then anyway.

In reply to handling #3 by stevens
in thread Rule-based sorting by DeusVult

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