How to get random numbers to be in order

This seems to have worked. Notes below.

23,24,24,35,44,51,52,53,54,55,61,74,74,90,90,91,93,104,105,110,113,114,122,124,1 28,128,130,131,132,132,136,143,149,150,151,152,153,154,156,157,157,158,160,161,1 64,165,166,167,168,181,181,183,190,191,192,193,194,196,198,200,203,203,204,205,2 05,208,208,209,211,211,212,212,214,214,215,216,218,218,219,219,219,220,226,231,2 32,232,235,236,237,238,249,255,256,263,267,268,270,271,272,273,276,277,279,280,2 81,283,284,286,287,287,287,288,288,292,292,296,296,305,306,308,309,309,310,313,3 14,319,320,323,324,326,330,342,352,356,357,358,362,365,370,377,380,385,389,391,4 18,418,419,420,420,420,420,422,422,424,425,425,427,427,428,429,429,436,436,437,4 38,443,443,444,445,445,445,449,450,452,453,454,455,457,458,464,465,466,468,469,4 70,474,476,482,482,485,490,493,496,498,501,501,502,503,504,521,522,525,528,529,5 30,530,530,533,535,536,536,536,537,538,538,539,540,542,542,542,543,545,546,550,5 51,553,558,559,570,573,573,574,577,582,582,585,589,589,593,594,596,596,597,601,6 03,603,605,609,610,611,621,635,641,646,647,648,649,649,649,651,653,657,657,658,6 59,694,697,701,704,705,705,708,709,723,728,731,743,743,745,746,748,752,753,757,7 59,760,761,761,762,764,771,771,773,773,774,775,776,797,804,811,812,832,844,852,8 55,856,869,877,881,887,892,894,895,897,908,909,915,917,922,924,924,924,924,924,9 24,924,925,926,1099

Copied from your post.

Pasted into a new TextEdit document as Plain text.

Set to wrap to page.

Deleted newline characters forcing line breaks inside numbers, and those forcing new lines not at the right edge of the page.

Deleted stray spaces.

Used Find/Replace to replace all commas with returns.

Copied file content, now a list on the numbers, one per line, separated by returns.

Opened a new Numbers document, selected cell B2 (top left non-header cell) and Pasted

Selected column B and sorted ascending.

Copied the sorted list.

Pasted back to new Textedit document.

Used Find/Replace to replace the returns with commas.

Copied.

Pasted here.

EDIT: The split numbers at the ends of some rows do not appear in the editor when composing the message. You may have to manually trim them after copying to the destination.

Regards,

Barry

Given the selected block of numbers that are formatted as you have shown in your updated post, the following AppleScript will sort these numbers, and write them over the existing selection. By default, it will not allow duplicates, but it is commented in the AppleScript where this occurs, and if you want duplicates, you simply comment out the unique line, and uncomment the duplicates line.

Tested with Pages v5.6.2, and v6.3.1.

Make sure that you have your original number information saved in the comma-separated formatting before you run this script.

The following is scrollable text, so click in the top left of the recessed, scrollable content, and drag until you reach the last line (return) of the script. This will be a click, and drag downward operation. Sometimes, without releasing the click, you may have to bump the bottom edge of the scrollable region to force a continue of the selection process.

Copy and paste into the Script Editor (Launchpad : Other : Script Editor), click compile button, and then with an open Pages document with the block of numbers selected, click the Run button in the Script Editor.

Before After (no duplicates)

The first step is to normalize your data to use a single type of separator (e.g. comma, comma with trailing space, or just a space). Presently, your data has a mixture of all of these separators, and worse, whole numbers are split with newlines, creating an additional number that isn't supposed to be there.

Once you get the data normalized to a single separator, without numbers split by newlines — post it back as plain text, not as an image. Then, we will have something to split into a list of numbers that can be sorted with two-lines of AppleScript/Objective-C code. This is not a job for Pages, or Finder AppleScript dictionaries, or the third-party WordService tool.

Just living proof that there is always a simpler way… 😉

Select the list of numbers in Pages, and run the following AppleScript. It will copy the numbers onto the clipboard, and then use Perl to remove any inadvert white-space or newlines in the number string. It then takes this revised number string, and pulls it into a Perl array, where it is sorted uniq, and the final revised text is then shoved back onto the clipboard. Thus, you can choose another location in your Pages Body Text, and paste the sorted numbers there, without destroying the original number list.

Same output as the first AppleScript/Ruby solution.

set perl_syntax to "'-MList::MoreUtils qw(uniq)' -F',' -lane 'print uniq join \", \", sort {$a <=> $b} uniq @F;' "

tell application "System Events"

tell application process "Pages"

set frontmost to true

keystroke "c" usingcommand down-- copy selection to clipboard

end tell

end tell

set nbr_text to (do shell script "pbpaste | perl -p -i -e 's/[\\s\\n]*//g' ") as text

set revised_text to (do shell script "perl " & perl_syntax & "<<<" & nbr_text)

set the clipboard torevised_text

return