Alphabetical/Natural sorting in Clojure/Clojurescript

natural-sort.clj

(ns util.natural-sorting
  (:refer-clojure :exclude [sort sort-by])
  (:require [clojure.string]))

(defn parse-int [s]
  #?(:clj (Long/parseLong s)
     :cljs (js/parseInt s)))

(defn vector-compare [[value1 & rest1] [value2 & rest2]]
  (let [result (compare value1 value2)]
    (cond
      (not (zero? result)) result
      (nil? value1) 0
      :else (recur rest1 rest2))))

(defn prepare-string [s]
  (let [s (or s "")
        parts (vec (clojure.string/split s #"\d+"))
        numbers (->> (re-seq #"\d+" s)
                     (map parse-int)
                     (vec))]
    (vec (interleave (conj parts "") (conj numbers -1)))))

(defn natural-compare [a b]
  (vector-compare (prepare-string a)
                  (prepare-string b)))

(defn sort [coll] (clojure.core/sort natural-compare coll))

(defn sort-by [keyfn coll]
  (clojure.core/sort-by keyfn natural-compare coll))

hi folks, about license, feel free to use, no restrictions

Even though I told Lee I wasn't going to, I wrote a new implementation that handles integer overflow.

I'm not using str/split or mapv parse-int so I have a hunch that it is more lazy and more performant especially on long strings where the sort order can be determined early on without needing to split the entire string. It's just a hunch though. Anyone interested in doing some profiling? I'll get to it eventually...

Ha! That's awesome @wevre! I've no real interest in performance at this point, but maybe @p-himik has an interest?

I am indeed curious enough to profile it myself and also publish some generative tests I have already written for it in my own code. Just don't have enough time at the moment. Will probably get to it some time next week.

I did some benchmarking (rudimentary) and updated my library to version 0.0.10. Short story is the "lazy" version does outperform implementations based on splitting and parsing, but only for long (for some definition of long) strings, which I think are more rare. At least in situations where I use and where I imagine having a need to use natural sorting, I think they would be rare. Same goes for overflow, it's not a situation I am concerned with. Maybe my situation is an outlier, but so far I've had more control over the types of strings I'm needing to sort.

In this version 0.0.10 of my library I included implementations and tests for my original parse version (which remains the default), my lazy version, a bigint-based version (suggested by Lee), Wilker's original, and Eugene's version. I hope that is okay, I think I have explicit okay from everyone except Eugene but I'm guessing he is okay with including his version.

Sure, I don't mind.