Very simple question about strings

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Sameer
Sameer on 1 Aug 2014
Edited: Stephen23 on 27 May 2015
Hello all
I have a cell containing stings something like this:
A={'SI1','SI12','SI13','SI2'};
I have to arrange these strings either in ascending order or in descending based on the numbers they are having. Can anyone please guide?
Regards
  1 Comment
Stephen23
Stephen23 on 27 May 2015
Edited: Stephen23 on 27 May 2015
You can simply use my FEX submission natsort, which performs a natural order sort on a cell array of strings:
>> A = {'SI1','SI12','SI13','SI2'};
>> natsort(A)
ans =
'SI1' 'SI2' 'SI12' 'SI13'

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Accepted Answer

David Young
David Young on 1 Aug 2014
"According to the numbers" is ambiguous.
This sorts the strings in ascending order, making the digit in position 3 more significant than the digit in position 4, etc.:
Asorted = sort(A);
Your example is already sorted by this criterion.
This, on the other hand, makes the last digit the least significant, regardless of how many digits there are. It assumes that there are always 2 characters to ignore at the start:
nums = cellfun(@(s) str2double(s(3:end)), A);
[~, indexes] = sort(nums);
Asorted = A(indexes);

More Answers (1)

Honglei Chen
Honglei Chen on 1 Aug 2014

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