I had a list of books in a MariaDB table that I wanted to redo by date. There may be a way to export selected fields and sorted data from MariDB using PHPMyAdmin, but I don’t know the trick.
But it is possible, in some cases, to sort data by columns in BBEdit if the data cooperates. In this case it did.
(1, 'Fer-de-Lance', NULL, 1934, '553385453',
(2, 'The League of Frightened Men', NULL, 1935, '553385453',
(3, 'The Rubber Band', NULL, 1936, '553763091',
(9, 'The Silent Speaker', NULL, 1946, '553234978',
(10, 'Too Many Women', NULL, 1947, '553250663',
...
(34, 'Black Orchids', NULL, 1942, '0553257196',
(35, 'Not Quite Dead Enough', NULL, 1944, '0553261096',
All I need to do was figure out a grep pattern that would match just the date field.
The first thing I did was search for the field I wanted to sort by. It took some experimenting but the code used to find the field I was looking for is:
NULL, \d{4}
where \d means look for digits and {4} tells how many.
Putting that code into the “Sort using pattern” sort field results in lines sorted by date. Alternatively,
\d{4},
also works.
Then its a simple matter of stripping off the ID field and renumbering.