Sorting numeric-string-keyed objects in Velocity (like they would sort in JS)
One of our clients recently did a big import of JSON-formatted values into a Textarea field. The result in Velocity, after the usual #evaluate trick to rehydrate JSON, is equivalent to this:
#set( $stringKeyedObject = {
"0": "apples",
"100": "oranges",
"2": "pears"
} )
(The data is structured like that for an important reason I’ll explore in a near-future post.)
Here’s the thing: the system that exported this data uses NodeJS. In JS, creating an object literal like
let o = {
"0": "apples",
"100": "oranges",
"2": "pears"
};
and looping over the keys with
Object.entries(o).forEach( ([key,value]) => console.log(key,value) )
uses a specific, standards-defined order. Because the keys are all numeric strings (the term is array indexes in the ES standard), the entries are sorted as numbers, not in insertion order:
0 apples
2 pears
100 oranges
This differs starkly from Velocity. In Velocity, for an
