http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=79285


in reply to Golf: Arbitrary Alphabetical Sorting

Taking a few tricks from tilly, and influences from merlyn, this one appears to be 74 characters: 
sub o {
($c,*w,$")=@_;sub t{eval"y/\Q@$c\E/\0-\377/";$_}sort{t($_=$a)cmp t$_=$
+b}@w
}

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This will only work on single character 'alphabets', or those that y// can handle as UNICODE.

Update:
I forgot to include the "\Q" and "\E" escapes to prevent it from going south if the "alphabet" contained characters such as '/' or '\n'. 4 character penalty.

Update 2:
If you want to cheat, you can always insert the literal character ASCII 255 into the string instead of the comparatively verbose '\377', which saves 3 characters, yielding a length of 71, though some editors show that single "character" as 2 on screen.

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Re (tilly) 2: Golf: Arbitrary Alphabetical Sorting
by tilly (Archbishop) on May 10, 2001 at 12:02 UTC
    Excellent. As I responded in the buried thread, you can insert the literal characters for both escape sequences, yielding 70. This may really fubar some editors, but perl can handle it.

    BTW FWIW I don't consider this cheating.

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