Sorting

Sort an Array of Strings, from large to small and lexicographic for Strings of equal length

Perl

Interpeter: Perl

Numeric sort

my @sorted = sort {$a<=>$b} (3, 6, 4, 5, 2, 7, 1);

Alpha-Numeric sort

my @sorted = sort ('this', 'that', 'and', 'the', 'other');

Numeric sort or Alpha-Numeric sort if a numeric sort cannot be done

# note, this can be a oneliner
my @sorted = sort {
   ($a =~ /^\-?\d+\.?\d*$/ and $b =~ /^\-?\d+\.?\d*$/) ? $a <=> $b : $a cmp $b
} ('this', 'that', 'and', 'the', 'other', 3, 6, 4, 5, 2, 7, 1);

Python

Interpreter: Python 2.5

Python's lists have a method for in-place sorting; there's also a built-in sorted() method that can sort any iterable.

# create a sample list
words = ['Long', 'words', 'are', 'more', 'interesting', 'than', 'short', 'ones']

# order it and keep the result on another variable
sorted_words = sorted(words, key = lambda word: (-len(word), word))

# sorted_words: ['interesting', 'short', 'words', 'Long', 'more', 'ones', 'than', 'are']

Ruby

#create a test array
ary=['Long','words','are','more','interesting','than','short','ones']
ary.sort_by {|a| [-a.size,a]}
# => ["interesting", "short", "words", "Long", "more", "ones", "than", "are"]

UNIX Shell

words='Long words are more interesting than short ones'
sorted_words="$(
  for word in $words # doesn't work with ZSH since it won't do field splitting here
  do echo "$word"
  done | sort | \
    while read word
    do echo -n "$word "
    done
  echo
 )"
echo "$sorted_words"