When you sort strings alphabetically, you end up with<\/p>\n
We’ve all seen this, right? Here’s an example in PERL: my @sorted = sort @examples; This’ll give you: Here’s a quick fix to make it do the thing you meant, by zero-padding any numbers before comparing the strings: sub sensible_sort { This modifies the strings used in the sort comparisons by finding every string of one or more digits 0-9 and replacing it with a 20 digit version, padded with zeroes. (20 digits is a number picked from my arse, 6 would probably do). This technique is easy enough to do in C or php or whatnot. There may well be a library out there which already does it, but it’s a neat self-contained little technique, which makes our lists from our learning objects repository far saner. Lecture 10 was listed second!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you sort strings alphabetically, you end up with Project 1 Report Project 10 Report Project 2 Report Project 3 Report We’ve all seen this, right? Here’s an example in PERL: my @examples = ( “Project 1 Report”, “Project 2 Report”, “Project 3 Report”, “Project 10 Report”, “Project 2342 Report”, “Alpha 2.9”, “Alpha 10.1” ); […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sort"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nmy @examples = (
\n\"Project 1 Report\",
\n\"Project 2 Report\",
\n\"Project 3 Report\",
\n\"Project 10 Report\",
\n\"Project 2342 Report\",
\n\"Alpha 2.9\",
\n\"Alpha 10.1\" );<\/p>\n
\nprint join( \"\\n\",@sorted ).\"\\n\";<\/code><\/p>\n
\nAlpha 10.1
\nAlpha 2.9
\nProject 1 Report
\nProject 10 Report
\nProject 2 Report
\nProject 2342 Report
\nProject 3 Report<\/code>
\nWhat we really want is an alphabetic sort that treats numbers magically.<\/p>\n
\nmy @sorted = sort sensible_sort @examples;
\nprint join( \"\\n\",@sorted ).\"\\n\";<\/p>\n
\n my $a1=$a;
\n my $b1=$b; # clone these so we don't modify originals
\n $a1 =~ s\/(\\d+)\/sprintf(\"%020d\",$1)\/ge;
\n $b1 =~ s\/(\\d+)\/sprintf(\"%020d\",$1)\/ge;
\n return $a1 cmp $b1;
\n}<\/code><\/p>\n