Thanks for the reply. I've not used the Schwarztian Transform before so tend to shy away from it. However, I read a bit more about it and discovered that it won't work for my actual code which is an array of objects.

Your bucketsort is the elegant solution that I was seeking. Interesting though it's about twice as slow as my ugly version as indicated by this benchmark:

Benchmark: timing 500000 iterations of bucketsort, sort...
bucketsort:  2 wallclock secs ( 1.72 usr +  0.00 sys =  1.72 CPU) @ 29
+0697.67/s (n=500000)
      sort:  0 wallclock secs ( 0.89 usr +  0.00 sys =  0.89 CPU) @ 56
+1797.75/s (n=500000)
               Rate bucketsort       sort
bucketsort 290698/s         --       -48%
sort       561798/s        93%         --

[download]

Thanks
-Wm

In reply to Re: Re: Efficiently sorting array by non-alpha strings by knowmad
in thread Efficiently sorting array by non-alpha strings by knowmad

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