How to ignore "stop words" while sorting in MarkLogic? - sorting

Question

Is there any way to ignore "stop words" while sorting.
For example:
I have words like
dixit
singla
the marklogic
On sorting in descending order the result should be
singla, the marklogic, dixit
As in the above example the is ignored.
Any way to achieve this?
Update:
Stop word can occur at any place.
for example
the MarkLogic
MarkLogic is the best
the MarkLogic is awesome
while sorting should not consider any stop word in the text.
Above is just a small example to describe the problem.
In actual I am using search:search API.
For sorting, I am using sort-order search options.
The element on which I have to perform sorting is dynamic. There are approx 30-35 elements.
Is there any way to customize the collation at this level like to configure some words (stop words) which will be ignored while sorting.

Answer 1

There is no standard collation URI that is going to do this for you (at least none that I've ever seen). You can do it dynamically, of course, by sorting on the result of a function invocation, but if you want it done efficiently at scale (and available to search:search), then you need to materialize the sortable string into your document. I've often done this as an attribute on the element:
<title sortable="Great Gatsby, The">The Great Gatsby</title>
Then you put a range index on the title/#sortable attribute.
You can also use the "envelope pattern" where materialized metadata like this is maintained in its own section of the document with the original kept in its own section. For things like this, I think it's a bit more elegant to decorate the elements directly, to keep the context.

Answer 2

If I understand your question correctly you're trying to get rid of the definite article when sorting your result-set.
In order to do this you need to use some additional functions and create a 'sort' criteria. My solution would look like this (I'm also including some sample documents so that you can test this just by copy-pasting):
(:
xdmp:document-insert("/peter.xml", <person><firstName>Peter</firstName><lastName>O'Toole</lastName><age>60</age></person>);
xdmp:document-insert("/john.xml", <person><firstName>John</firstName><lastName>Adams</lastName><age>18</age></person>);
xdmp:document-insert("/simon.xml", <person><firstName>Simon</firstName><lastName>Petrov</lastName><age>22</age></person>);
xdmp:document-insert("/mark.xml", <person><firstName>Mark</firstName><lastName>the Lord</lastName><age>25</age></person>);
:)
for $person in /person
let $sort := fn:reverse(fn:tokenize($person/lastName, ' '))[1]
order by $sort
(: return $person :)
return $person/lastName/text()
Notice that now the sort order is going to be
- Adams
- the Lord
- O'Toole
- Petrov
I hope this will help.