[REQUEST] Add support for comparison operators for `rich.text.Text` to allow sorting

[peytondmurray]

Have you checked the issues for a similar suggestions? Yes

How would you improve Rich?

I'd like to implement __lt__ and __gt__ for rich.text.Text. This would allow sorting of Text objects, in the same way that you can sort str objects. The way I'd do this is by just casting the Text to a str before making a simple string comparison - which means only the plain text content of the Text would be used for the comparison, with any markup/styling being ignored.

What problem does it solve for you?

This would allow sorting of Iterable[Text | str] types. In particular the one place this shows up is in textual.widgets.DataTable.sort. Currently, textual.widgets.DataTable supports displaying rich.text.Text in cells, but when the table is sorted, the call fails because Text doesn't support comparison.

If this would be more appropriate to address in textual, I can take the discussion there. Otherwise I'm happy to be the one to implement this change here?

[github-actions]

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[willmcgugan]

I wouldn't advise it. Text and str are quite different and not as interchangeable is they might appear. Most notably, Text is mutable and str is immutable.

If you need to sort, you can do key=str.

[peytondmurray]

Okay, thanks for the feedback - closing now!

[github-actions]

I hope we solved your problem.

If you like using Rich, you might also enjoy Textual