Sort each standalone line alphabetically

Question

I want to sort some items in alphabetic order, but in a very specifc way.

I have, for example, the following list, each item separated by comma:

monkeys, big dogs, cats
pineapple, banana, orange
yellow, red, blue, green
silver, gold, platinum
delphi, java, c++, visual basic

An item here is defined by the piece of text: 1. starting in the beginning of a line and ended right before the first comma; 2. surrounded by commas and 3. starting right after the last comma and ending ate the end of line. So spaces are not separators, as in "big dogs" forms a single item.

I want to sort each line alphabetically, WITHOUT changing line order.

My desired result would be:

big dogs, cats, monkeys
banana, orange, pineapple
blue, green, red, yellow
gold, platinum, silver
c++, delphi, java, visual basic

My target list has got 3000+ lines, so it should be an automated process.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Powershell one liner:

$sep=","; gc infile.txt |% {$line=($_ -split $sep)|% {$_.trim()}|sort;$line -join $sep} >outfile.txt

Notes:
1. Uses PS 2 join syntax, which is more compact.
2. Using , as separator (as shown) will remove all leading/trailing spaces from words. That's is what I assume from context you want, but if I took your description literally, they should be retained. If you do wish so, remove |% {$_.trim()} (but then sort will not work 'as expected' for your example with leading spaces)
3. You may use ,<space> (or anything else, for that matter) as output separator (-join ", ") this will normalize any mixed input (with or without spaces after comma) to the one you selected.
4. Default encoding for output in PS is Unicode (UTF-16). You may change it by using | out-file -Encoding <encoding_type> instead of redirection > if you need to control that. To see available encodings, run help out-file -full

Answer 2

Here's one that ought to do it in python.

import csv

f = open("sortrows.csv", 'rb')
reader = csv.reader(f)

outf = open("sortedrows.csv", 'w')
for row in reader:
    row.sort()
    outf.write(",".join(row) + "\n")

f.close()
outf.close()