What is the Sort Character?

Can I assign a number in the sort character. For Example, use it as a personal rating system independent of the 5-star system

The sort character tells LibraryThing which character to use for alphabetical sorting.

So if the title of a book was "A Cat's Day" and I set the sort character to 1, LT would use the "A" as where to start for putting in alphabetical order with my other books.

If I used 3 as the sort character, LT would use the "C" in Cat's as where to start for putting the book in alphabetical order.

You could use it as a personal rating system if you wanted, no one's stopping you, but you wouldn't be able to sort your books by title if you did.

>1 JoeB1934: Not unless you don't need title sorting because that's what it''s used for. If it says 5, it will sort from the 5th character. It's used ot disregard articles at the beginning, e.g. The White Dragon will sort as White Dragon, if it says 5. Normally, for English titles sort character is generated automatically, but you can change it.

It only affects sorting order in your own books, so you can use it for any purpose you like, with no consequence to any other users, however using it for a rating system would make your library look (to anyone else browsing it) like somebody drunk has got into the library and placed all the books onto the shelves in a random order :-)

An alternate to this, if you wanted somewhere to write a personal scoring system, is if you wrote the score at the start of the Comments or Private Comments field. Either of these fields can be sorted into order too, allowing you to view them high to low or low to high, and still keep the alphabetical order for the sort character.

Edit: formatting.

>1 JoeB1934: If you use the Comments field and format the information so a program can extract it, you can do all sorts of tricks with the TSV export file.

And as >4 Nevov: says, you can put the score at the start of the Comments field so you can sort on that field.

Also, you can't sort on the sort character.

MarthaJeanne (#6):

Also, you can't sort on the sort character.

Sure you can! It's not available in the dropdown, but it can be added as a column to a display style and then you can click on the column header.

>4 Nevov: This seems to provide a good solution for me. I will try it. Thanks.

>5 bnielsen: This is a major advantage for me and I will use it.

>9 JoeB1934: I use Comments for three things, I think. 1. Keeping track of translations. 2. Keeping track of scanned covers. 3. Keeping track of series.

An example:

If you look at https://www.librarycat.org/lib/bnielsen/item/147737154
you'll see (under Local notes:)

Omslag: Ikke angivet
Omslaget viser Maigret, der ser tavst på en anden mand
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Oversat fra fransk "Les caves du Majestic" af Karen Nyrop Christensen
Maigret, bind 28

So the first two lines describe the cover. The next says that I scanned it on my old flatbed scanner. The next gives the original title in French along with the translator. And the last one says it is volume 28 in a Danish series with Maigret stories.
By being a bit careful when choosing the format of these lines I get the ability to parse the information with a script.

I.e.
$ cat /tmp/lt.rdb | perl /tmp/column Comment | perl /tmp/checkserier | grep Maigret
Maigret 1-16, 18-43, 45-51, 53, 53-59, 62-75, 77-78

telling me to go out and buy the volumes 17, 44, 52, 60, 61, 76 if I can find them :-)

ETA: I also noticed that I had skipped four volumes of the Asterix comics, so I'm off to the library :-)
33=Da himlen faldt ned
34=Fødselsdag,den gyldne gæstebog
35=Asterix og Pikterne
36=Cæsars papyrus