From: Daniel Waite <rabbitblue@...>
Date: 2007-11-01T07:19:30+09:00
Subject: Sorting a string...

I was porting a small Python script over to Ruby and realized Ruby does
not sort strings as I expected it would.

'cba'.sort # ["cba"]

So I wrote this...

class String

  def sort
    bytes = Array.new
    self.each_byte { |byte| bytes << byte }
    bytes.sort.collect { |byte| byte.chr }.join
  end

end

'cba'.sort # "abc"

It's fairly clean, but I don't like the bytes = and self.each_byte bits.
It feels like there should be a way to say something like...

self.each_byte(&:collect).sort.collect { |byte| byte.chr }.join

Or something like that. I think some of the frustration comes from
Python seemingly being able to do this "out of the box." Unless, of
course, the following Python code generates an array of single
characters and not a single array with two strings (in which case Ruby
CAN do the same):

letters = list(state1 + state2) # I assume this is [ s1, s2 ]
letters.sort()
key = "".join(letters)

Any ideas?
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