Sort Array Elements (string with numbers), natural sort

Question

I have an array like;

[\"IL0 Foo\", \"PI0 Bar\", \"IL10 Baz\", \"IL3 Bob says hello\"]

And need to sort it so it appears like;

Answer 1

You could do a regex like this to get non-numeric and numeric parts of the string:

var s = "foo124bar23";
s.match(/[^\d]+|\d+/g)

returns: ["foo", "124" , "bar" , "23"]

Then in your compare function you can iterate through the parts of the two strings comparing them part-by-part. The first non-matching part determines the result of the overall comparison. For each part, check if the part starts with a digit and if so parse it as a number before doing the comparison.