Re: Dictionary-style sort a la Tcl?

[blakem]

Here is a quick late-night attempt.... It assumes the words only consist of [A-Za-z] and relatively small integers. Not perfect, but it does work on your sample dataset. Oh, it also sorts 'aa' before 'a1' which is probably not correct, but you didn't mention it in the requirements.

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;

{ # Create an interleaved 'AaBbCc' mapping
  my %map;
  $map{$_} = 2*(ord($_)-ord('A'))   for 'A'..'Z';
  $map{$_} = 2*(ord($_)-ord('a'))+1 for 'a'..'z';

  # use interleaved map to munge word into a string that will sort "co
+rrectly"
  sub dictize {
    my $word = shift;
    $word =~ s/(\d+|[A-Za-z])/chr($map{$1}||60+$1)/ge;
    return $word;
  }
}


my @words = qw(bigBoy bigbang bigboy
               x10y x9y x11y);

# Sort based on lowercased munged words,
# use the non-lowercased version as a tiebreaker
my @sorted = map  {$_->[0]}
             sort {$a->[1] cmp $b->[1] or
                   $a->[2] cmp $b->[2]}
             map  {[$_,dictize(lc),dictize($_)]} 
             @words;

print "$_\n" for @sorted;

__END__

bigbang
bigBoy
bigboy
x9y
x10y
x11y

-Blake