How to Sort a Unicode String in Ruby

The Ruby programming language has many built-in functions that allow you to quickly accomplish general programming tasks. You can use these built-in functions to sort a Unicode string so that all of its characters are arranged alphabetically. This is useful if you want to count the occurrences of all the identical characters in a string. You can sort the string using just a few lines of code, making this a valuable and yet simple tool.

Things You'll Need

• Computer with Ruby interpreter and ruby-unicode installed.

Instructions

1. Load the Ruby interpreter by clicking on the Interactive Ruby icon located under Programs in the Windows start menu or Applications in Mac OS. A window with the "Ruby" command prompt appears.

2. Create a string named "str" and assign to it the value "String" by typing the following statement into the Ruby command prompt:

   str = "String"

3. Convert the string to Unicode using the following function:

   str = str.to_u

4. Split the string into an array of characters and save the result to the variable "str" by typing the following:

   str = str.split(//)

5. Sort the character array using the "sort" function, like this:

   str = str.sort

6. Convert the sorted character array back into a string using the following statement:

   str = str.join

7. Observe the output to verify that the string is sorted alphabetically:

   "ginrst"

References

• Ruby: Class String

Resources

• Ruby: Download
• Sourceforge: Ruby-Unicode