Sort order of CompletionItems display

[wsande]

If I have a list of CompletionItems like this:
[(1, 'red'), (2, 'blue'), (3, 'green'), ... (10, 'magenta'), (11, 'cyan')]

When I tab-complete the command, it displays the completion items like this:

ID
==============
1     red
10    magenta
11    cyan
2     blue
3     green

How do I get them to display in numerical order of item ID's instead of alphabetical order?

[kmvanbrunt]

First sort the results how you want them to display. Then set self.matches_sorted = True before returning them.

Here is a description of matches_sorted from cmd2.py. This value gets reset to False each time tab completion runs, so you don't need to reset it manually.

# Set to True before returning matches to complete() in cases where matches have already been sorted.
# If False, then complete() will sort the matches using self.default_sort_key before they are displayed.
# This does not affect self.formatted_completions.
self.matches_sorted = False

One thing to note is that CompletionItem inherits from string. Therefore the IDs are being converted to strings when you create each CompletionItem. To sort strings in numerical order, use a natural sort. cmd2 provides natural sort functions in utils.py.

You can do either of the following:

from cmd2 import utils

# 1. This way sorts in place
my_list.sort(key=utils.natural_keys)

# 2. This way makes a copy of the list
my_list = utils.natural_sort(my_list)

If you sort the ID numbers before creating your CompletionItem list, then you won't need to use the natural sort functions.

[wsande]

Thanks! That's exactly what I needed