Datatable sorting scientific notation

vivekmyself

Hi,

I am using dataTables to display the content. I am not able to sort with scientific notation. Datatable is treating p-values as string when in scientific notation (1E-10). It should be treating it as number. Is there any plugin to sort the scientific notations?

nickschurch

I'm having this issue too. Anyone know of a good way to make dataTables sort Scientific notation properly? Ideally it should be able to handle sorting a column containing a mixture of numerical formats. So...

6.5, 5, 5.4E2, 1.2E6, 0.000001, 1E-2

should sort as:

0.000001, 1E-2, 5, 6.5, 5.4E2, 1.2E6

allan

A sorting plug-in would be needed for this since they aren't read as numbers by Javascript. There is documentation on how to do it here:
http://datatables.net/development/sorting

and a number of sorting plug-ins already built (although not one that matches your requirements I'm afraid) here:
http://datatables.net/plug-ins/sorting

If you do create such a plug-in, it would be great if I could add it to the plug-ins page!

Allan

nickschurch

Thanks for pointing me to that lot, its actually trivially easy! parseFloat turns out to be rather clever...

[code]
/* new sorting functions */
jQuery.fn.dataTableExt.oSort['allnumeric-asc'] = function(a,b) {
var x = parseFloat(a);
var y = parseFloat(b);
return ((x < y) ? -1 : ((x > y) ? 1 : 0));
};

jQuery.fn.dataTableExt.oSort['allnumeric-desc'] = function(a,b) {
var x = parseFloat(a);
var y = parseFloat(b);
return ((x < y) ? 1 : ((x > y) ? -1 : 0));
};

/* pick the column to give the datatype 'allnumeric' too */
$('#example').dataTable({
"aoColumnDefs": [{ "sType": "allnumeric", "aTargets": [ 3 ] } ]
} );
[/code]

This stupidly straightforward solution seems to work just fine.

allan

Perfect! I didn't know parseFloat could do that :-). Can I post it up not eh plug-ins page? What name / link would you like for the credit?

Allan

nickschurch

Sure, no problem. My name is Nick Schurch and feel free to link it to my forum user id.

allan

Super thanks! I've put it up here: http://datatables.net/plug-ins/sorting#scientific (called it 'scientific' rather than 'allnumeric' as I think in future it will be easier for people to find when they are looking for just such a function, but otherwise identical :-) ).

Thanks very much for contributing to the project!

Regards,
Allan

nickschurch

No problem, I've taken far more from it than I've contributed!