NaturalSort

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About

Natural sort order is an ordering of strings in alphabetical order, except that multi-digit numbers are ordered as a single character. Natural sort order has been promoted as being more human-friendly ("natural") than the machine-oriented pure alphabetical order.

For example, in alphabethical sorting "z11" would be sorted before "z2" because "2" is sorted as smaller than "1", while in natural sorting "z2" is sorted as smaller than "z11" because "2" is sorted as smaller than "11".

Functionality to sort by natural sort order is built into many progamming languages and libraries.

Authors

Antônio Galvão and Rik van Kekem

Platforms

Linux and Windows.

Features

1) Topic enumerators sort till 99 subtopics:
    1
    1.1.1
    1.1.2
    1.2.1
    1.99.99
    2
2) Integers sort:
    0
    00
    000
    1
    2
    10
3) Floating point numbers sort:
    0,99
    1
    1,01
    1,99
    2
Collated alpha sort:
    Alpha sorting task made by OS (Windows and Linux).
Thousand separated numbers sort: =
    1.198
    1.199
    1.199,50
    1.200
    1.201
IP addresses:
    10.145.254.9
    10.145.255.9
    10.145.255.10
    10.146.254.9
    121.243.100.0
    255.255.255.254

Thousand and decimal separators are the system default ones.

It is fast. See the time against other functions:

     StrCmpLogicalW: 1
    WideCompareText: 1,238
        NaturalSort: 0,746

Download

The latest version is available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarusfiles/files/naturalsort.zip/download

A demo project is included.

Functions and Procedures

procedure NaturalSort(aList: TStrings);

Example of usage:

 procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender :TObject);
 begin
   NaturalSort(Memo1.Lines);
 end;

function UTF8NaturalCompareList(aList: TStringList; Index1, Index2: Integer): Integer;

Example of usage:

 procedure NaturalSort(aList: TStrings);
 var
   L: TStringList;
 begin
   L := TStringList.Create;
   try
     L.Assign(aList);
     L.CustomSort(@UTF8NaturalCompareList);
     aList.Assign(L);
   finally
     L.Free;
   end;
 end;

function UTF8LogicalCompareText(const S1, S2: string): Integer;

function UTF8NaturalCompareText(const S1, S2: string): Integer;