gobyexample/examples/sorting-by-functions/sorting-by-functions.go
2014-01-21 14:10:10 -08:00

44 lines
1.3 KiB
Go

// Sometimes we'll want to sort a collection by something
// other than its natural order. For example, suppose we
// wanted to sort strings by their length instead of
// alphabetically. Here's an example of custom sorts
// in Go.
package main
import "sort"
import "fmt"
// In order to sort by a custom function in Go, we need a
// corresponding type. Here we've created a `ByLength`
// type that is just an alias for the builtin `[]string`
// type.
type ByLength []string
// We implement `sort.Interface` - `Len`, `Less`, and
// `Swap` - on our type so we can use the `sort` package's
// generic `Sort` function. `Len` and `Swap`
// will usually be similar across types and `Less` will
// hold the actual custom sorting logic. In our case we
// want to sort in order of increasing string length, so
// we use `len(s[i])` and `len(s[j])` here.
func (s ByLength) Len() int {
return len(s)
}
func (s ByLength) Swap(i, j int) {
s[i], s[j] = s[j], s[i]
}
func (s ByLength) Less(i, j int) bool {
return len(s[i]) < len(s[j])
}
// With all of this in place, we can now implement our
// custom sort by casting the original `fruits` slice to
// `ByLength`, and then use `sort.Sort` on that typed
// slice.
func main() {
fruits := []string{"peach", "banana", "kiwi"}
sort.Sort(ByLength(fruits))
fmt.Println(fruits)
}