Question

I’m currently rewriting the userlist implementation in an IM client interface that uses JavaScript. The names in this list are currently sorted alphabetically, and I want to edit this so that it only takes alphabetical characters in account when comparing strings.

For instance: “1foo” comes after “bar”, because “foo” comes after “bar”.

I know I could just create two temporary strings by removing all non-alphabetical characters from the two original strings, but I’m guessing that there must be easier ways to do this.

Answer 1

Well, if you have an array of strings called arr, you can use this one-liner:

arr.sort(function(a,b) {return a.replace(/[^a-z]/ig,'') > b.replace(/[^a-z]/ig,'') ? 1 : -1;});

arr is now sorted taking only letters into account.