Sort a string alphabetically using a function
You can use array sort
function:
var sortAlphabets = function(text) {
return text.split('').sort().join('');
};
STEPS
- Convert
string
toarray
- Sort
array
- Convert back
array
tostring
Demo
As previous answers have shown, you convert the string to an array of single-character strings, sort that, and then recombine it into a string. But, using split
isn't the best practice way to do that first step, because a JavaScript string is a series of UTF-16 code units with invalid surrogate pairs tolerated, and split("")
splits up surrogate pairs into their individual code units, potentially separating them, thus breaking the code point (loosely: character) they're supposed to form as a pair. So if you have an emoji in the string (for instance) or any of hundreds of thousands of characters in non-Western scripts, those can get broken.
In ES5 and earlier, correctly splitting the string required that you detect and handle surrogate pairs to ensure they stayed together, which was a bit of a pain and involved checking charCodeAt
for specific ranges of values.
As of ES2015+, it's really easy: You just use the string's iterator, which is defined to provide each code point in the string, whether that's a single code unit or two. To get an array of the code points, you can use the iterator via spread notation ([...str]
) or Array.from
(Array.from(str)
).
So using that, we get:
function sortAlphabets(str) {
return [...str].sort((a, b) => a.localeCompare(b)).join("");
}
Live Example:
// Using the iterator
function sortAlphabets(str) {
return [...str].sort((a, b) => a.localeCompare(b)).join("");
}
// Using split("")
function sortAlphabetsUsingSplit(str) {
return str.split("").sort((a, b) => a.localeCompare(b)).join("");
}
const str = "ðदेवनागरीð";
console.log("Original string : " + str);
console.log("Using the iterator : " + sortAlphabets(str));
console.log("Using split('') : " + sortAlphabetsUsingSplit(str));
Note how using split
, some of the characters have gotten mangled.
Newer browsers support String.prototype.localeCompare() which makes sorting utf8
encoded strings really simple. Note that different languages may have a different order of characters. More information on MDN about localCompare.
function sortAlphabet(str) {
return [...str].sort((a, b) => a.localeCompare(b)).join("");
}
console.log(sortAlphabet("drpoklj")); // Logs: "djklopr"
If you only have to support ascii strings then the default sorting implementation will do.
function sortAlphabet(str) {
return [...str].sort().join("");
}