Naturally

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

The core of the search is from here. It's since been extended to handle the particular types of numbers that come up in statutes, such as 335.1, 336, 336a, etc.

Naturally will also sort "numbers" in college course code format such as MATH101, MATH102, .... See the specs for examples.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'naturally'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it outside of bundler with:

$ gem install naturally

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.

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