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[Susan Chute]

Hello there,
I just want to say I am enjoying this database, which has solved many problems I previously had with LibreBase. I posted a good review in the Apple Store. It seems very robust. I’m not up to scripting in JavaScript yet (after all, I just finished learning SQL in the W3school for LibreBase). So my question is, I have a big database of poems. I want to sort it by title, but for the sort to ignore A, An and The. I know that you could probably write a script, but as of yet I don’t know how (start after 1st 2, 3, or 4 characters, maybe, is part of it?). Can you explain? or is there an easier way?
Thanks for TapForms! Yay!

[Daniel Leu]

Yeah, you could write a script or use the calculation field to strip “A “, “An “, or “The ” from the title string. The script or calculation would then return the shortened title on which you could perform your search.

Using calculation seems to be a bit more complicated than using a script:

function Stripped_Title() {
	// Define Id of title field
	const title_id = 'fld-dec6b20e27d343e181e37a813624b467';
	let title = record.getFieldValue(title_id);

	// Check for "A "
	if (title.toLowerCase().substr(0,2) == "a "){
		return title.substr(2)
	}	

	// Check for "An "
	if (title.toLowerCase().substr(0,3) == "an "){
		return title.substr(3)
	}	
	
	// Check for "The "
	if (title.toLowerCase().substr(0,4) == "the "){
		return title.substr(4)
	}
}

Stripped_Title();

I don’t know if all your titles start with an uppercase character. So I translate them to lowercase to catch “a”, “an” and “the” as well. Good luck!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Daniel Leu.

[Susan Chute]

Thank you, Daniel. I’ll go about trying this.

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