Re: Natural sort comparison
- Posted by Spock Jul 20, 2017
- 2318 views
The Natural Order algorithm is by Andy Serpa. "Natural Order" is sometimes called "Lexical Order" which is the alternative to "arithmetic order." The existing algo does not do everything..
I have not thought about unicode and case sensitivity (monocasting; seems like an ugly word) variations in a custom sort.
In the pastey I left out a second sorting algo that is optimized for objects that are only string sequences--making it about twice as fast. In the original he also uses custom_sort(ID) as a way of executing the sorting.
Since using routine_id is expensive, is it worth writing the sorting comparison directly into the sorting algorithm?
_tom
If performance were really needed there could be another way:
From the original data 'S' create a key sequence 'A' to be used for the comparison [user accesses whatever functions they like in naturalsort.e]
Create an index array 'B' same length as A, eg, {1,2,3..}
Sort B via A using sort_index() [if that happens to exist in the API]
remap S using B
I personally don't like the idea of putting relatively rare cases into a general purpose API when the user could deal with them in the code.
Spock
