Re: How do I do a natural sort on an array?

[Dominus]

I'm not exactly sure what you want (it would have helped if you had provided an example) but here's what I use:

sub byfile {
  my @a = split /(\d+)/, $a;
  my @b = split /(\d+)/, $b;
  my $M = @a > @b ? @a : @b;
  my $res = 0;
  for (my $i = 0; $i < $M; $i++) {
    return -1 if ! defined $a[$i];
    return 1 if  ! defined $b[$i];
    if ($a[$i] =~ /\d/) {
      $res = $a[$i] <=> $b[$i];
    } else {
      $res = $a[$i] cmp $b[$i];
    }
    last if $res;
  }
  $res;
}

This may be more complicated than you need. Given the following:

53 7 119 53red
red5 red6 red7 red67 red6.jpg red12.jpg
green4.jpg
blue2.jpg blue1000.jpg blue2.jpg58

it produces the following output:

7
53
53red
119
blue2.jpg
blue2.jpg58
blue1000.jpg
green4.jpg
red5
red6
red6.jpg
red7
red12.jpg
red67

Lucs St. Louis also suggests:

 while (defined (my $A = shift @a) and defined (my $B = shift @b)) {
   $res = ($A =~ /\d/) ? $A <=> $B : $A cmp $B;
   return $res if $res;
 }
 return defined $A ? -1 : 1;

Hope this helps.