Natural Sort

Natual sorting implementation in Ruby.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "natural_sort"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install natural_sort

Usage

list = ["a10", "a", "a20", "a1b", "a1a", "a2", "a0", "a1"]
list.sort(&NaturalSort) # => ["a", "a0", "a1", "a1a", "a1b", "a2", "a10", "a20"]

list = ["a10", "a", "a20", "a1b", "a1a", "a2", "a0", "a1"]
NaturalSort.sort(list)  # => ["a", "a0", "a1", "a1a", "a1b", "a2", "a10", "a20"]

list = ["a10", "a", "a20", "a1b", "a1a", "a2", "a0", "a1"]
NaturalSort.sort! list  # => ["a", "a0", "a1", "a1a", "a1b", "a2", "a10", "a20"]
list  # => ["a", "a0", "a1", "a1a", "a1b", "a2", "a10", "a20"]

UbuntuRelease = Struct.new(:number, :name)

ubuntu_releases = [
  UbuntuRelease.new("9.04", "Jaunty Jackalope"),
  UbuntuRelease.new("10.10", "Maverick Meerkat"),
  UbuntuRelease.new("8.10", "Intrepid Ibex"),
  UbuntuRelease.new("10.04.4", "Lucid Lynx"),
  UbuntuRelease.new("9.10", "Karmic Koala"),
]

ubuntu_releases.sort_by { |v| NaturalSort(v.number) }
# => [
#   UbuntuRelease.new("8.10", "Intrepid Ibex"),
#   UbuntuRelease.new("9.04", "Jaunty Jackalope"),
#   UbuntuRelease.new("9.10", "Karmic Koala"),
#   UbuntuRelease.new("10.04.4", "Lucid Lynx"),
#   UbuntuRelease.new("10.10", "Maverick Meerkat")
# ]

Refinements

If you're running ruby 2.1 or newer, you can use refinements.

require "natural_sort/refinements"

class MyClass
  using NaturalSort

  list.natural_sort                         # => ["a", "a0", "a1", "a1a"...
  ubuntu_releases.natural_sort_by(&:number) # => [ UbuntuRelease.new("8.10"...
end

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/rwz/natural_sort.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.