So in another thread I rather blithely assumed sorting a dictionary in pure Quest (not JS), while maybe tedious, wouldn't be that hard to do. However I was playing around with it and there seems to be a couple of stumbling blocks, the main one is that you can't cast a string to a char.

Since you can't compare strings as far as I can tell, comparing chars is the next best thing. But while you can compare chars, I don't see a way to cast strings to chars, so if you start with a string key from a dictionary, is it possible to compare those string keys in order to sort them?

Using the FLEE cast() didn't work, and even if it did work it wouldn't be a great solution anyway since it won't convert to JS.

Is JS the best option here?

The only pure Quest solution I can think of at the moment is to maintain a mapping of numbers to chars, and strings to numbers, such that given a string like "s", you could find a number (say 20) which is mapped to the char 's'. Then you could get the char 's' that way. But it's quite roundabout.

Perhaps you could use StringListSort
http://quest5.net/wiki/StringListSort

You have the Asc function at your disposal. Here is a quick and dirty and rather ugly quick implementation of a "string less than" function.

<!--Saved by Quest 5.5.5173.27901-->
<asl version="550">
  <include ref="English.aslx" />
  <include ref="Core.aslx" />
  <game name="SortTest">
    <gameid>235470e7-3e53-4464-ada0-28904679c835</gameid>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <firstpublished>2014</firstpublished>
    <start type="script">
     <![CDATA[
      msg(StringIsLessThan("a", "b"))
      msg(StringIsLessThan("B", "D"))
      msg(StringIsLessThan("ab", "adc"))
      msg(StringIsLessThan("z", "abc"))
      ]]>
    </start>
  </game>
  <function name="StringIsLessThan" parameters="s1, s2" type="boolean">
  <![CDATA[
  	len1 = LengthOf(s1)
  	len2 = LengthOf(s2)
  	len = len1
  	if (len > len2) {
  		len = len2
  	}
  	i = 1
  	done = false
  	while (i <= len and not done) {
  		c1 = Asc(Mid(s1, i, 1)) 
  		c2 = Asc(Mid(s2, i, 1)) 
  		if (c1 < c2) {
  			done = true
  			ret = true
  		} else if (c1 > c2) {
  			done = true
  			ret = false
  		}
  		i = i + 1
  	}
  	if (not done) {
  		ret = len1 < len2
  	}
  	return (ret)
  	]]>
  </function>
  <object name="room">
    <inherit name="editor_room" />
    <object name="player">
      <inherit name="editor_object" />
      <inherit name="editor_player" />
    </object>
  </object>
</asl>

It might be helpful as well to explain why you want to sort the keys. There might be a different solution to the same problem. (BTW, I was surprised that direct string comparison doesn't work. I would have bet money on it.)

Pertex, how in the world did you find that? (That's a bit of a rhetorical question.) I did a search on the Wiki for "sort" and the only link from the List page was for ObjectListSort. That's definitely the solution to the question.

Thanks guys, I completely missed Asc! StringListSort would certainly work too. I noticed it's one of those functions that's in the wiki but doesn't show up when you filter for library elements in Quest itself.

It's not a core (ASLX) function but rather implemented in the expression parser (from what I can see).

george wrote:I noticed it's one of those functions that's in the wiki but doesn't show up when you filter for library elements in Quest itself.

http://quest5.net/wiki/Category:All_Fun ... t_Commands

That is the single most helpful page of the entire wiki, you can find a lot of functions that you wouldn't have even thought to search for but come in very useful.