jQuery tablesorter plugin secondary “hidden” sorting

Question

I\'m using the jQuery tablesorter plugin and I have a column that contains name of month and year like this

April, 1975
January, 2001

I would l

Answer 1

It's a bit of a hack (OK, it's a total hack), but if you set the parser for the column to 'text', and pre-fix your pretty output with the string you really want to sort on within a hidden span it will sort correctly.

You can set the parser on a column with the headers option, e.g. to set the parser on the first and second columns to 'text' you would set the following:

headers: {0: {sorter: 'text'}, : {sorter: 'text'}

To do this trick with dates, you can use the ISO8601 date format which sorts lexically. JS's Date objects can generate ISO8601 date strings via the toISOString() function.

Given the CSS:

span.hidden{
    display:none;
}

A sample cell in the table would look like this:

2015-04-18T23:48:3319 April 2015

Not the prettiest code in the world, but it does work.