Sorting By Multiple Conditions in Ruby

I recently had to sort by multiple conditions in Ruby, and had a hard time coming up with the Ruby way to do this. The Ruby Docs didn't have what I was looking for, either.

Thankfully, #ruby-lang was very helpful (and confirmed that the docs were lacking here).

Let's say you want to sort this array of arrays:


a = [[1,2,3],[1,0,2],[2,3,2]]


and you want to sort by both the 0 and 1 indexes of the inner arrays.

You can write this:


a.sort_by{|e| [e[0],e[1]]}


You will get this:


[[1,0,2],[1,2,3],[2,3,2]]


The sort_by method is used when it's costly to do the comparison itself (for instance, if you need to sort File objects, which are costly to create during a normal call to sort).

sort_by creates another enumeration of keys, one for every element in your array to be sorted. In the above example, we are relying on the fact that Array implements the <&eq;> method. So we are creating a new array which contains the multiple elements corresponding to our multiple conditions.

Note that this trick of creating an array of the sortable values will work just fine in sort.

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