Natural sorting helper

[roger peppe]

Nice! Could I suggest that the Less implementation is exported
independently so that it can be used in other sort.Interface
implementations (for example if we wanted to sort a slice of
structs by a naturally-sorted key)?

Perhaps call it StringCompareNatural and make it the same
signature as strings.Compare?

On 22 June 2016 at 11:35, Menno Smits <menno.smits at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Earlier this week I needed to be able sort a slice containing unit names and
> machine ids in a way that would make sense to a human. For example, a
> conventional string sort would order a list of machine ids like this:
>
> 0
> 10
> 3
> 3/lxd/1
> 3/lxd/10
> 3/lxd/11
> 3/lxd/2
> 4
>
> when what I really wanted was:
>
> 0
> 3
> 3/lxd/1
> 3/lxd/2
> 3/lxd/10
> 3/lxd/11
> 4
> 10
>
> Tim pointed me at something that Anastasia had already done for formatting
> the output from some Juju CLI commands. This was close so I extracted it to
> github.com/juju/utils and generalised it. An in-place sort can be performed
> like this:
>
> utils.SortStringsNaturally(someSliceOfStrings)
>
> The implementation is here:
>
> https://github.com/juju/utils/blob/master/naturalsort.go
> https://github.com/juju/utils/blob/master/naturalsort_test.go
>
> Consider using it if your code needs to sort machine ids, unit names, tag
> strings, IP addresses and any other slice of strings which contain sections
> of digits.
>
> - Menno
>
>
>
>
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