jQuery tablesorter plugin secondary "hidden" sorting

Question

I'm using the jQuery tablesorter plugin and I have a column that contains name of month and year like this

April, 1975
January, 2001

I would like to sort this column as if it were a date column. As I understand it, it is possible to sort the column with some other 'hidden' value, but I just can't seem to find the documentation for that feature. Any help out there?

Update

This fork http://mottie.github.com/tablesorter/docs/index.html of the tablesorter had just what I needed; the ability to store the value to sort by in an attribute, worked really great.

Answer 1

Just using the textExtraction function. Set data-sort-value on your TDs. Defaults to normal text if it's not present.

$(".sort-table").tablesorter({
    textExtraction: function(node) {
        var attr = $(node).attr('data-sort-value');
        if (typeof attr !== 'undefined' && attr !== false) {
            return attr;
        }
        return $(node).text(); 
    } 
});