I am trying to find examples of this to help me but can't seem to locate any on the web. Anyone know of any online examples? I know ruby has a built in method for sorting an array, but it's part of a tutorial...
Thanks!
jlc
A simple example would be a natural order comparison ("a20" sorting
before "a120"). A bit of googling turned up Alan Davies' String#natcmp
implementation:
http://sourcefrog.net/projects/natsort/natcmp.rb
Christopher
···
On 3/2/08, Joseph L. Casale <jcasale@activenetwerx.com> wrote:
I am trying to find examples of this to help me but can't seem to locate any on the web. Anyone know of any online examples? I know ruby has a built in method for sorting an array, but it's part of a tutorial...
A basic string sorting routine would just sort based on ASCII
codepoints (see a list at http://urltea.com/2tu7 ).
So you could do this in Ruby 1.9:
irb(main):002:0> class String
irb(main):003:1> def <=> other
irb(main):004:2> self.each_char.map(&:ord) <=> other.each_char.map(&:ord)
irb(main):005:2> end
irb(main):006:1> end
<, >, ==, !=, etc. are all defined in terms of <=>, the spaceship
operator, so all of the previous operations are affected when we
define <=>. Arrays sort by comparing the first non-matching element.
irb(main):011:0> %w[a c b g h j g p q].sort
=> ["a", "b", "c", "g", "g", "h", "j", "p", "q"]
Of course this has a lot of deficiencies:
irb(main):014:0> %w[a c b g h j g p q Z A G].sort
=> ["A", "G", "Z", "a", "b", "c", "g", "g", "h", "j", "p", "q"]
So we could downcase each character or something.
But even advanced sorting algorithms have problems -- German sorts
beta as nn or something and lots of other languages have similar
issues. Book listings generally don't include words like "the" when
sorting, etc. I would decide those before starting.
···
On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Joseph L. Casale <jcasale@activenetwerx.com> wrote:
I am trying to find examples of this to help me but can't seem to locate any on the web. Anyone know of any online examples? I know ruby has a built in method for sorting an array, but it's part of a tutorial...
Thanks!
jlc
Hi Christopher and Daniel,
You'll have to bear with me as I have just started learning Ruby and both examples seem a bit over my head as of yet. Is there anything more basic you know of?
Thanks for being patient 
jlc
···
On 3/2/08, Joseph L. Casale <jcasale@activenetwerx.com> wrote:
> I am trying to find examples of this to help me but can't seem to
locate any on the web. Anyone know of any online examples? I know ruby
has a built in method for sorting an array, but it's part of a
tutorial...A simple example would be a natural order comparison ("a20" sorting
before "a120"). A bit of googling turned up Alan Davies' String#natcmp
implementation:http://sourcefrog.net/projects/natsort/natcmp.rb
Christopher
Hey jlc,
try this here: https://github.com/reiz/naturalsorter
That is a very easy to use wrapper for natcmp.rb.
If you still have questions, don't be shy! 
- Robert
Joseph L. Casale wrote in post #640701:
···
http://sourcefrog.net/projects/natsort/natcmp.rb
Christopher
Hi Christopher and Daniel,
You'll have to bear with me as I have just started learning Ruby and
both examples seem a bit over my head as of yet. Is there anything more
basic you know of?Thanks for being patient
jlc
--
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