(:

I never meant to imlpy that you posted the GRT version for speed. You see, before starting this thread, i did a search on sorting URLs by hostnames. That led to GRT, GRT/ST, the sort paper, and eventually the benchmark results i posted. I benchmarked your version too just to see how it would compare to my two previous solutions. Just plain curiosity.

About order of host name components... i wanted to keep URLs sorted based on the 2d part of domain name in (com|net|org|edu), thus the "slightly peculiar" order. But then, i hadn't thought about the country code. Needless to say that that shows.

So far i came upon only one or two such URLs in my netscape history. If i need to keep in the desired order, i have to work on the sorting of country codes too... back to drawing board...

(Thanks by the way.)