Swift ✉️ Memos

How to properly sort user-facing strings 😌

Hi 👋

Have you ever tried to sort user-facing strings?

It's a problem that's much more complex than it seems!

However, it can be very easy to solve if you know which function to call.

What's this function? We're going to discover it in this email!

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Imagine that you have an array of file names and that you want to order them:

The straightforward approach would be to call the method sorted() on the array:

Because String conforms to the protocol Comparable, you don't even need to explicitly provide a comparison function.

However, when you look at the result, it probably won't be what you were expecting!

You would probably expect the file names to be ordered by ascending numbering, like the Finder app would do.

But this is not what happens. And it's definitely not a bug!

It's because when you compare the strings character by character, 1 does come before 2 and 2 does come before 5:

In order to have a Finder-like ordering, we need a comparison function that takes into account whether a digit represents a unit, a ten or a hundred.

And this is exactly what localizedStandardCompare() will achieve!

This function uses the current Locale in order to sort an array of strings in the same way the Finder app would:

Even better: the usefulness of this function doesn't limit to numberings!

It can also be very helpful when dealing with diacritics, such as accents, or even people's name 👌

That's all for this email, thanks for reading it!

If you've enjoyed it, feel free to forward it
to your friends and colleagues 🙌

I wish you an amazing week!

❤️

How to properly compare localised strings 😌

How to properly sort user-facing strings 😌