Is there a way to sort an association list? In my case I would like to sort the alist elements by the values in each list element (represented by the integers in the example below).
Example:
(setq my-alist '((red . 2) (blue . 1) (yellow . 8) )) ; make an alist
(sort my-alist '<) ; does not work
At the excellent ergo emacs on hash tables (http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp_hash_table.html) I found out this also works for alists:
(sort my-alist (lambda (a b) (string< (car a) (car b))))
...which sorts by the colors in the example, and consequently:
(sort my-alist (lambda (a b) (< (cdr a) (cdr b))))
...which sorts by the numbers in the example.
(cl-sort my-alist #'< :key #'cdr) is another possibility
seq.el library also permits (seq-sort-by #'cdr #'< my-alist), similarly to the cl-sort example above.
assqand friends is the first matching element, and therefore changing the order of the list can (potentially, depending on the alist) change the value obtained.