How can I use Jinja2 to generate an index-like list? - sorting

Question

In an index, references are listed alphabetically and grouped by letter. Also, instead of a simple alphabetical sort, leading articles and punctuation are removed before sorting. The result would look like this:
A
Abba
The Archer
Away From Here
B
"Bangkok" Mike
Bullets
I'm using the Pelican static site generator, which uses Jinja2 in its templates, and I'd like to create an index like this of TV shows that I've blogged about on my site.
TV show names are listed in a metadata field {{ article.showname }} (only one show per post, so only one show in the metadata field) and so are easily retrieved. But stripping the leading article/punctuation, grouping by first letter and inserting the correct letter of the alphabet is more than I know how to do.
Possible steps I could take
I could strip the leading article/punctuation and create another metadata field with the show name that's ready to be sorted, called, say, {{ article.shownamesort }}. For that matter, if there's not an easy way to group the names by their first letter, I could create a metadata field with the show's first (sortable) letter, {{ article.shownameletter }}.
For each letter, I could create a loop that begins by grabbing that letter's posts:
{% if article.shownameletter == "A" %}
Once that's done, I don't know how to sort the text from one metadata field based on the text of a different metadata field. That is, I don't know how to print the {{ article.showname }} list that's sorted by the {{ article.shownamesort }} list. Can this be done in Jinja2? For the record, if there's a solution that takes a completely different approach, I'd be very happy with it, including if it required different/more metadata fields.

Answer 1

I did something like that on the tags and categories pages. It iterates over all the characters and then prints the results
Iterate over the letters:
{% for char in "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789"|list %}
...
{% endfor %}
Comparison for show or not show the tag:
{% if char == tag|upper|truncate(1, True, end='') %}
...
{% endif %}
Full example:
{% for char in "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789"|list %}
<h2>{{char}}</h2>
{% for tag, articles in tags|sort %}
{% if char == tag|upper|truncate(1, True, end='') %}
<dt>{{ tag }}</dt>
{% for article in articles|sort %}
<dd>{{ article.title }}</dd>
{% endfor %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}