Natural sort for alphanumeric strings

Sort character vectors containing embedded numbers in natural numeric order rather than lexicographic order. For example, "c1g2" comes before "c1g10", which standard sort() would not guarantee.

Usage

mixed_sort(x)

Arguments

x

Character vector to sort.

Value

A character vector sorted in natural numeric order.

Details

The function extracts all numeric segments from each string using stringr::str_extract_all() and sorts by them sequentially (first number, then second). Designed for two-segment identifiers such as "c1g1", "c2g10", etc.

See also

sort() for standard lexicographic sorting.

Examples

mixed_sort(c("c1g10", "c1g2", "c1g1", "c1g9"))
#> [1] "c1g1"  "c1g2"  "c1g9"  "c1g10"

mixed_sort(c("group12", "group1", "group3"))
#> [1] "group1"  "group3"  "group12"