Humanesort

A crate for sorting the way humans would.

This crate aims to provide the sorting behavior a human might expect. Say you have a directory of files all called "Something-" with a sequential number appended. With traditional sorting by character the file "Something-11" would occur after the file "Something-2". Often this is not the desired behavior, this crate implements a more human compatible ordering by treating each occurrence of consecutive digits as a combined number in sorting.

The crate implements the type HumaneOrder for common types (currently only most string types) and HumaneSortable for slices of HumanOrder types.

The API is very simple to use:

use humanesort::prelude::*;
let mut sort_me = vec!["something-11", "something-1", "something-2"];
sort_me.humane_sort();
assert_eq!(vec!["something-1", "something-2", "something-11"], sort_me);

Details on String Sorting

For sorting, a string is split into numeric and non-numeric sections. The comparison starts at the first group and if no group is (by any of the rules) larger than the other the comparison moves on to the next section. For comparison of sections the following rules are used.

• Any non-numbers are compared using their usual compare methods
• Numbers are always greater than nun-numbers
• Numeric sequences are ordered by their numeric value
• Empty sequences are always smaller than non-empty ones

These examples should give you some idea of how this works out in practice:

use humanesort::HumaneSortable;
let mut a = ["lol-1", "lal-2"];
a.humane_sort();
assert_eq!(a, ["lal-2", "lol-1"])

use humanesort::HumaneSortable;
let mut a = ["13-zzzz", "1-ffff", "12-aaaa"];
a.humane_sort();
assert_eq!(a, ["1-ffff", "12-aaaa", "13-zzzz"])