sorting - Jquery - sort DIV's by innerHTML of children

Question

I've got html that looks something like this:

<div id="sortThis">
<div id="1">Price:<span class="price">20</span><span class="style">blue</span></div>
<div id="2">Price:<span class="price">23</span><span class="style">red</span></div>
<div id="3">Price:<span class="price">10</span><span class="style">red</span></div>
<div id="4">Price:<span class="price">29</span><span class="style">green</span></div>
<div id="5">Price:<span class="price">35</span><span class="style">blue</span></div>
</div>

And I want to be able to sort by .price or by .style

I suspect that this post partially answers my question: Sort Divs in Jquery Based on Attribute 'data-sort'?

And this plugin comes close to doing what I need (since it can handle child attributes) but it does not seem to go as far as children's innerHTML: http://tinysort.sjeiti.com/

Any help will be appreciated by this noob.

Answer 1

To do this sort directly using the child values and without a plugin, you could use something like:

function sortUsingNestedText(parent, childSelector, keySelector) {
    var items = parent.children(childSelector).sort(function(a, b) {
        var vA = $(keySelector, a).text();
        var vB = $(keySelector, b).text();
        return (vA < vB) ? -1 : (vA > vB) ? 1 : 0;
    });
    parent.append(items);
}

Sorting by price can then be done as such:

sortUsingNestedText($('#sortThis'), "div", "span.price");

The function is parametrised so that it can be easily reused with other divs and different sort keys.

Here's a demo: http://jsfiddle.net/tc5dc/

---

Using the tinysort plugin

Alternatively, if you can benefit from the features provided by the tinysort plugin (mentioned in question), you could dynamically augment your divs to suit the plugin.

Check out this demo: http://jsfiddle.net/6guj9/

In the example, we first add the price and style values as data attributes of the holding div:

var sortThis = $('#sortThis').children("div");
sortThis.each(function() {
    var p = $(this);
    p.attr("data-price", p.find("span.price").text());
    p.attr("data-style", p.find("span.style").text());
});

We're then free to use tinysort to sort on the relevant attributes. Sorting by price would be simply:

$("#sortThis>div").tsort({attr:"data-price"});

Changing the sort order and keys can be done by simply passing in different config objects. The linked demo shows one way to do this, but you can probably come up with a better scheme to suit your needs.