Ruby: fine grained sorting

Ruby sorting is really easy, lets see some examples. If we had this array: ["abc", "aaa", "add", "bcc", "baa"] sorting normally we would get:

Let’s say we wanted to sort by the second letter, we could do this using the sort_by method:

Now lets see a more complex example, if we wanted to sort an email list:

First by the host name and then by the user name we can use the sort_by method like this:

We pass a block to sort_by with the ‘rules’ we want to sort by, we are using a regular expression to express how we want to sort, they are /@./ which matches everything after the at sign and /.@/ which matches everything before.

Finally we can apply the same idea to uniq so that we can get unique data based on a pattern, I use this in Dirfuzz to filter the results and avoid duplicates when I have duplicate results that aren’t exactly the same.

This regexp will allow me to get rid of duplicates with this data:

This would stay the same with a simple uniq, but passing a block with that regexp will get rid of the duplicates.