Hi, we are trying to sort things naturally in ExDoc . Can anybody recommend a natural sorting algorithm implementation in Elixir? I have a a few but I am looking for options, Thank you.

How do you define “natural”? Things that come to mind: ignore case ignore diacritics 2 < 10

Mostly. Case should not be ignored, but order should be: A, a, B, b, and not A, B, a, b as sorting by ASCII code does.

I have this hacky solution which should work but probably isn’t optimal: Enum.sort_by(~w(A B a b), &{String.downcase(&1), &1})

FWIW, I have proposed the custom optimized sorter: Sort items "naturally" in menu, summary, function list, etc. · Issue #1440 · elixir-lang/ex_doc · GitHub

[image] sabiwara: Enum.sort_by(~w(A B a b), &{String.downcase(&1), &1}) EDIT: the implementation is correct, I had the wrong input The problem with this approach is that it returns different results depending on the initial order for the same list shuffled. iex(16)> Enum.sort_by(~w(A B a b)…

Thank you Aleksei for your contribution to the discussion, later one with more time, I will look in detail and see how I can apply those to the NaturalOrder library. There are a few lessons to take from the discussion.

Well, this is obvious implication of the fact that Enum.sort* functions are using stable sort algorithms.

I’m sorry if I misunderstood your comment, but this example is not using the same list shuffled, these are different lists. I believe the result provided is the expected one? If I reuse the example from your issue it seems fine too: iex(1)> ~W(a A b) |> Enum.sort_by(&{String.downcase(&1), &1}) …

[image] eksperimental: ~w(a B B b) You are right. I messed up with the input. Your implementation.

We updated NaturalSort with changes from @eksperimental . Thanks for fixing those bugs. [image] natural_order A utility to compare strings in Natural order.

Natural Sorting algorithms

Questions & Help Questions

eksperimental December 8, 2021, 10:06pm 10

You are right. I messed up with the input. Your implementation.