Re^4: Golf: Arbitrary Alphabetical Sorting

[tadman]

TMTOWTDI, as they say, and this one appears to be 70 characters:

sub o {
($c,*w,$")=@_;sub t{eval"y/@$c/\0-\377/";$_}sort{t($_=$a)cmp t$_=$b}@w
}

[chipmunk]

Unfortunately, that fails if @$c includes a slash. Fixing this bumps it up to 74 characters:

sub o {
    ($c,*w,$")=@_;sub t{eval"y/\Q@$c\E/\0-\377/";$_}sort{t($_=$a)cmp t
+$_=$b}@w
}

[tilly]

I find this turn of events absolutely astounding, and I only have one thing to add.

It may not display well, but the two escape sequences can be replaced by the actual characters. This brings it back down to 70. Here is the paste from my system, this may not work on yours:

sub o{
($c,*w,$")=@_;sub t{eval"y/\Q@$c\E/-ÿ/";$_}sort{t($_=$a)cmp t$_=$b}@w
}

UPDATE
It definitely won't work on yours. It seems the \0 was trimmed from the output. To get what you need go back to chipmunk's post, download his code to a file, then run this:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/\\(\d+)/chr(oct($1))/e' filename

(Use " instead of ' on Windows.) The resulting file will have the key subroutine reduced to 70 characters, and will still run.