Sorting Text in ROR

Rails
1

While sorting /ordering text it considers space first, then ‘.’ then
characters

e.g. @user = User.find(:all,:order=>‘name’)

it outputs

A Sharma
A. Bansal ---------------with dot
Aarti Dev

Is there any way to sort, so that i get the output as
Aarti Dev
A. Bansal
A Sharma

2

On Jun 10, 2011, at 10:59 AM, Runa wrote:

Is there any way to sort, so that i get the output as
Aarti Dev
A. Bansal
A Sharma

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Array.html#M000244

You want to either use the block form or define your own version of
<=> to use, stripping punctuation and downcasing the input for good
measure to create a “natural” sort.

Walter

3

On Friday, June 10, 2011 10:13:02 AM UTC-6, Walter Lee D. wrote:

class Array - RDoc Documentation

You want to either use the block form or define your own version of
<=> to use, stripping punctuation and downcasing the input for good
measure to create a “natural” sort.

Walter

Just beware that if you ever end up using a pagination gem (or rolling
your
own) such that you get a single “page” of results using limit and offset
on
your back-end database, this’ll screw up any chance of your custom
sorting
working correctly. If you’ll never be using LIMIT and OFFSET SQL
clauses,
then this works great!

4

Thanks Walter and Kendall.

But ouput which I get using sort mentioned is as follows

a = [ “A Sharma”, “A. Zah”, “Aarti Jain”, “A. Bansal”, “Bindu Lakra” ]
=> [“A Sharma”, “A. Zah”, “Aarti Jain”, “A. Bansal”, “Bindu Lakra”]

a.sort {|x,y| y <=> x}
=> [“Bindu Lakra”, “Aarti Jain”, “A. Zah”, “A. Bansal”, “A Sharma”]

I want my sort to skip “.” and spaces while sorting.

My intended output is
=> [“Aarti Jain”, A. Bansal", “A Sharma”,“A. Zah”, “Bindu Lakra” ]

Is there any way to get it sorted the way i wanted where . and space
is not considered while sorting?

5

If I were you I would add a new column PLAIN_NAME or similar and I
would strip everything out everything you don’t want in the name and
then sort by it. I think it would remove the complexity. You can
populate the new column with a before_save callback.

6

On 11 June 2011 07:10, Runa [email protected] wrote:

My intended output is
=> [“Aarti Jain”, A. Bansal", “A Sharma”,“A. Zah”, “Bindu Lakra” ]

You have not shown us the code you have used to do the sort so how can
we tell what is wrong with it? Make sure you copy/paste it here
rather than re-type it so we can see exactly what you have done. Just
the code for the sorting please. First make sure you understand the
code you have used. Can you see why it does not do what you want?

Colin