Which sorting algorithm is best suited to re-sort an almost fully sorted list?

Question

I have a list of strings which has been sorted by a specific comparison function.

Now I have to re-sort this list using a different comparison function.

Answer 1

As I understood your data list is allready sorted (let say by ascii/country charset order), but without some dictionary rules applied for particular country. For example Germany and their Umlauts

see Germanic_umlaut in wikipedia

you are not inserting new items, you just want to resort them by little bit more strict sorting rule.

as you can read for example here

http://www.softpanorama.org/Algorithms/Sorting/bubblesort.shtml

bubble sort works well on allready sorted lists with just a few permutations. This sounds like bubble sort is good algorithm to start with. Also note that bubble sort is "stable" sorting algorithm. This could be important for your scenario.