keep-sorted, with quotes

13 Mar, 2025 • 201 words • 1 min • updated 03 Jan, 2026

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keep-sorted has been previously covered.

Problem statement: how to automatically sort the following YAML list?

     yaml
     
   
- azure-workload-identity
- clustermon
- flatfile
- kube2iam
- mongo
- node-local-dns
- "pgbouncer*"
- "rabbitmq*"
- "redis*"
- traefik
- vault

I would naturally add keep-sorted to it, but the result is not what I expected:

     yaml
     
   
# keep-sorted start
- "pgbouncer*"
- "rabbitmq*"
- "redis*"
- azure-workload-identity
- clustermon
- flatfile
- kube2iam
- mongo
- node-local-dns
- traefik
- vault
# keep-sorted end

Quotes are coming first!

Which does indeed make sense. They are ASCII characters (ascii(7)), value 34, which comes before a-z. Oh well.

I tried ignore_prefixes=" to no avail. I also tried by_regex=[\w-]+ to no avail.

Only the following form worked:

     yaml
     
   
# keep-sorted start by_regex=['\w+[\w ]*']
- azure-workload-identity
- clustermon
- flatfile
- kube2iam
- mongo
- node-local-dns
- "pgbouncer*"
- "rabbitmq*"
- "redis*"
- traefik
- vault
# keep-sorted end

…but it’s a mouthful. I filed an upstream bug: https://github.com/google/keep-sorted/issues/76.

Edit(2025-01-04): Thanks Ho Man for the following suggestion:

     yaml
     
   
# keep-sorted start by_regex=\w+
- azure-workload-identity
- clustermon
- flatfile
- kube2iam
- mongo
- node-local-dns
- "pgbouncer*"
- "rabbitmq*"
- "redis*"
- traefik
- vault
# keep-sorted end

Backlinks

go/keep-sorted (Sep 22, 2025)

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