Naturally

Natural (version number) sorting with support for legal document numbering, college course codes, and Unicode. See Jeff Atwood's Sorting for Humans: Natural Sort Order and the WebLaws.org post Counting to 10 in Californian.

Usage

require 'naturally'

# Sort a simple array of strings
Naturally.sort(["1.1", "1.10", "1.2"])  # => ["1.1", "1.2", "1.10"]

Usually the library is used to sort an array of objects:

# Define a new simple object for storing Ubuntu versions
UbuntuVersion = Struct.new(:name, :version)

# Create an array
releases = [
  UbuntuVersion.new('Saucy Salamander', '13.10'),
  UbuntuVersion.new('Raring Ringtail',  '13.04'),
  UbuntuVersion.new('Precise Pangolin', '12.04.4'),
  UbuntuVersion.new('Maverick Meerkat', '10.10'),
  UbuntuVersion.new('Quantal Quetzal',  '12.10'),
  UbuntuVersion.new('Lucid Lynx',       '10.04.4')
]

# Sort by version number
sorted = Naturally.sort_by(releases, :version)

# Check what we have
expect(sorted.map(&:name)).to eq [
  'Lucid Lynx',
  'Maverick Meerkat',
  'Precise Pangolin',
  'Quantal Quetzal',
  'Raring Ringtail',
  'Saucy Salamander'
]

See the spec for more examples of what Naturally can sort.

Related Work

• ahoward/version_sorter, the starting point for the naturally gem.
• GitHub's Version sorter

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request