How do I alphabetize an array ignoring case?
RubyAlphabetical SortRuby Problem Overview
I'm using Chris Pine's Learn to Program and am stumped on his relatively simple challenge to take user input in the form of a list of random words and then alphabetize them in an array. Questions about this challenge have come up before, but I haven't been able to find my specific question on SO, so I'm sorry if it's a duplicate.
puts "Here's a fun trick. Type as many words as you want (one per line) and
I'll sort them in...ALPHABETICAL ORDER! Hold on to your hats!"
wordlist = Array.new
while (userInput = gets.chomp) != ''
wordlist.push(userInput)
end
puts wordlist.sort
While this does the trick, I'm trying to figure out how to alphabetize the array without case-sensitivity. This is hard to wrap my head around.
I learned about casecmp
but that seems to be a method for comparing a specific string, as opposed to an array of strings.
So far I've been trying things like:
wordlist.to_s.downcase.to_a.sort!
which, in addition to looking bad, doesn't work for multiple reasons, including that Ruby 2.0 doesn't allow strings to be converted to arrays.
Ruby Solutions
Solution 1 - Ruby
How about:
wordlist.sort_by { |word| word.downcase }
Or even shorter:
wordlist.sort_by(&:downcase)
Solution 2 - Ruby
In general, sort_by is not efficient for keys that are simple to compute. A more efficient comparison is to use sort with a block and replace the default comparison operator <=> with casecmp
wordlist.sort { |w1, w2| w1.casecmp(w2) }
For more information about efficiency gains, consult the official Ruby documentation for the sort_by method: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.2/Enumerable.html#method-i-sort_by
Solution 3 - Ruby
I had the same question at my Ruby coding bootcamp. Here's what worked for me:
puts "Type in a sentence."
sentence = gets.chomp.downcase
puts sentence.split(" ").sort