[libreoffice-users] Help with sorting a CSV file using LibreOffice Calc

Hi,

I'm having a bit of a problem sorting records in a CSV file using
LibreOffice Calc.

I have a CSV file that contains information about ethnic media
organizations. The file contains 3 columns: company ID#, company name, and
ethnicities. The first field contains an alphanumeric 6 to 8 digit string.
The second field contains a plain text string which may occasionally
contain fancy symbols. The third field contains a list of ethnicities
relevant to the organization, delimited by double percent signs (%%). Here
is an example record:

70f9d2,Acme Inc.,Mexican%%Chinese

I have been trying to sort this file by selecting everything and clicking
"Data" -> "Sort..." When the sort dialog comes up I select column A and
column B as sort keys 1 and 2, respectively. In the options tab, I am
checking the box next to "Range contains column labels" because my file
does include a header column.

I am getting very strange results when I try to execute the sort. For some
reason, a large number of records are disappearing as a result of the sort.
I am saving a separate file containing the sorted version of the records.
See command log below comparing the line count of both the original and
sorted versions:

$ wc -l company-ethnicities.csv
   55261 company-ethnicities.csv
$ wc -l company-ethnicities-sorted.csv
   30815 company-ethnicities-sorted.csv

A whopping 24446 records are being deleted somehow... why is this? Does
LibreOffice Calc's sort feature also remove duplicates?

FYI: The reason I am not using the sort shell command instead is because it
is also giving me problems (for some reason it's mangling the CSV file and
putting a ton of records into a single field.... and yes, I did try setting
LC_ALL to C)

Does anyone know what might be causing this? I appreciate any help I can
get on this one.

Thanks.

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