Display Sentence in Alphabetical Order

Question

Write a program that takes a string and outputs all the characters in alphabetical order. Spaces and symbols can be ignored or deleted, but the upper‑ and lowercase letters must remain the same case.

Sample input:

Johnny walked the dog to the park.

Sample output:

aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy

Rules:

• Any language.
• Shortest code wins.

Answer 1

GolfScript, 24 / 6 characters

{26,{65+.32+}%?)},{31&}$

Example:

> Johnny walked the dog to the park.
aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy  

If the input is restricted to printable ascii the code can be shortened by three characters using {95&.64>\91<&}, as filter.

Can be tested here.

The can-be-ignored version is even shorter (6 chars):

{31&}$

and yields output

> Johnny walked the dog to the park.
      aaddeeeghhhJkkl.nnoooprtttwy

Answer 2

GNU core utils - 25 characters (29 dropping symbols)

fold -1|sort -f|tr -d \\n

Example (from GNU bash 3):

$ echo "Johnny walked the dog to the park."|fold -1|sort -f|tr -d \\n
      .aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy   <<no trailing newline>>

From the question:

Spaces and symbols can be ignored or deleted

I chose to leave them in! To retain only alphabetic characters, replace fold -1 with grep -o \\w for +4 characters.

grep -o \\w|sort -f|tr -d \\n

Thanks to Firefly for recommending grep -o over sed, and Wumpus for fold -1. ;-)

Answer 3

C, 121

This is quite long compared to other entries, but it does not rely on any built-in sorting or ToLower functions:

j;main(k){char s[99],*p=s;gets(s);while(*p){j=p-s-1;k=*p++;while(j>=0&&(s[j]|32)>(k|32))s[j+1]=s[j--];s[j+1]=k;}puts(s);}

More readable version:

j; main(k) {
    char s[99], *p=s;
    gets(s);
    while(*p) {
        j = p-s-1;
        k = *p++;
        while(j >= 0 && (s[j]|32) > (k|32))
            s[j+1] = s[j--];
        s[j+1] = k;
    }
    puts(s);
}

This is an implementation of insertion sort with a case-insensitive comparison between elements (using the |32 bitwise operation). This is because in ASCII encoding uppercase letters and lowercase letters only differ by the 2⁵ bit.

Answer 4

Ruby - 33 Chars

$><<gets.chars.sort(&:casecmp)*''

Answer 5

PowerShell : 39

$([string[]][char[]](Read-Host)|sort)" #With spaces and symbols

Result

  .aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy

C# : 100

Console.Write(new string(input.ToCharArray().OrderBy(a=>char.ToLower(a)).ToArray()).Trim('.',' '));

Result

aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy

Answer 6

Perl6: 26 characters

Sorts output uppercase first, then lowercase, deletes symbols/whitespace

say [~] sort comb /\w/,get

If whitespace/symbols in output may be ignored too, this is only 21 characters.

say [~] get.comb.sort

This sorts case-insensitively, keeps symbols (26 chars)

say [~] get.comb.sort: &lc

Answer 7

APL 16

      ⍞←A[⍋48|⎕av⍳A←⍞]
Johnny walked the dog to the park.
      aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy.

Answer 8

Perl 34

Now takes input from STDIN.

print sort{lc$a cmp lc$b}<>=~/\w/g

---

Perl 18

If output including capitals first and symbols included is acceptable:

print sort<>=~/./g

Answer 9

Python 3: 45

print(''.join(sorted(input(),key=str.lower)))

Answer 10

Haskell, 88

import Data.List
import Data.Char
import Data.Ord
main=interact$sortBy$comparing toLower

(38 without imports from standard lib)

Answer 11

k (10 9)

Reads from stdin

x@<_x:0:0

Example

x@<_x:0:0
Johhny walked the dog to the park.
"      .aaddeeeghhhhJkklnoooprtttwy"

Answer 12

C#: 83

Console.Write(new string(Console.ReadLine().OrderBy(i=>i+"".ToLower()).ToArray()));

Update: 65

Executable in LinQPad

new string(Console.ReadLine().OrderBy(i=>i+"").ToArray()).Dump();

Answer 13

F# (68 56)

I'm learning F# so I'm sure this could be shorter:

let f s=s|>Seq.sortBy Char.ToLower|>Seq.iter(printf"%c")

Output:

> f "Johnny walked the dog to the park."
        .aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy 

Answer 14

Uiua, 9 bytes

⊏⍏¯⌵.▽⌵±.

Try it online!

Explanation:

          . -> duplicates the top value on the stack
      ▽⌵±   -> keeps letters that are alphabetic
   ¯⌵.      -> generates lowercased keys for sorting
⊏⍏          -> sorts in ascending order

Answer 15

MathGolf, 2 bytes

áδ

Try it online!

Example output

      .aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy

Removing non-alphabetical characters

To remove all non-alphabetical characters, this solution works:

áδgÆ∞_δ¡

It is the same as the code above, followed by a filtering where each character is first doubled, and then compared its own capitalization. For example, the string "a" is converted to "aa" and then capitalized to "Aa", which is not equal to "aa". The same way, the string "B" is converted to "BB" and capitalized to "Bb", which is not equal to "BB". However, "." is converted to ".." and is unchanged when capitalized, so it will become filtered out.

Explanation

I really need more string handling in MathGolf... Right now there isn't even an operator to convert to lowercase/uppercase. The only thing I could use was the capitalization operator, which works like an uppercase operator for strings of length 1. This solution also sorts non-alphabetical characters, but those could be ignored. The alphabetical characters preserves their case and are output in the correct order.

á    sort by comparator
 δ   capitalize string

Answer 16

J, 12 characters

(/:32|a.i.])

Ignores any non-alpha characters.

Answer 17

Javascript - 74

Unfortunately, due to the way JS sorts characters, we cannot use standard sorting function:

prompt().split("").sort(function(a,b){return a.localeCompare(b)}).join("")

Actually this can be shortened to:

prompt().split("").sort((a,b)=>a.localeCompare(b)).join("")

Answer 18

PHP, 50 bytes

$a=str_split($argn);natcasesort($a);echo join($a);

does not remove non-letters, takes input from STDIN; run with -R.

Answer 19

Java 10, 72 bytes (as lambda function)

s->{for(int i=64;++i<91;)for(var c:s)if((c&~32)==i)System.out.print(c);}

Try it online.

But since it's an old challenge stating full program:

Java 10, 126 bytes (as full program)

interface M{static void main(String[]a){for(int i=64;++i<91;)for(var c:a[0].toCharArray())if((c&~32)==i)System.out.print(c);}}

Try it online.

Explanation:

interface M{                        // Class
  static void main(String[]a){      //  Mandatory main method
    for(int i=64;++i<91;)           //   Loop over the uppercase alphabet
      for(var c:a[0].toCharArray()) //    Inner loop over the characters of the input
        if((c&~32)                  //     If the current character converted to uppercase,
                  ==i)              //     equals the current letter of the alphabet
          System.out.print(c);}}    //      Print the character of the input-loop

Answer 20

J, 9 bytes

/:tolower

Modernized J solution that uses a monadic hook.

Attempt This Online!

Answer 21

R, 48 characters

cat(sort(unlist(strsplit(scan(,""),""))),sep="")

Example usage:

> cat(sort(unlist(strsplit(scan(,""),""))),sep="")
1: Johnny walked the dog to the park.
8: 
Read 7 items
.aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy

Answer 22

q/k4 (3? 5? 8?)

if it's sufficient to enter the code and the input directly into the REPL, it's just asc:

q)asc"Johnny walked the dog to the park."
`s#"      .Jaaddeeeghhhkklnnoooprtttwy"

the `s# is bit of q notation that indicates that the string is in sorted order (can be binary searched, etc.). if it has to go, that costs two characters, making five:

q)`#asc"Johnny walked the dog to the park."
"      .Jaaddeeeghhhkklnnoooprtttwy"

if you want it provided on stdin, it's time to switch to k4 (and we get rid of the `s# for free), and it's an eight-character solution:

  x@<x:0:0
Johnny walked the dog to the park.
"      .Jaaddeeeghhhkklnnoooprtttwy"

that one, btw, will work as a code file exactly as is (still eight characters, since q is fine with not having the final newline in a code file). normally there would be issues with a welcome banner and with the REPL staying open, but if you pass the input as a herestring, all that goes away:

$ cat asc.k
x@<x:0:0
$ q asc.k<<<'Johnny walked the dog to the park.'
"\n      .Jaaddeeeghhhkklnnoooprtttwy"
$ 

not actually sure where that extra newline in the output is coming from....

Answer 23

Jelly, 3 bytes

ŒlÞ

My first Jelly solution on this site! Thanks to @LeakyNun and @ErikTheOutgolfer for teaching me how to use Jelly and @Dennis for making it! :D

Explanation

ŒlÞ
  Þ Sort using the function to its left
Œl  Converts to lowercase (because it's sort alphabetically, not by codepoint)

Alternatively, ŒuÞ does the exact same thing except converting to uppercase instead.

Answer 24

05AB1E, 3 2 bytes

Σl

Ignores non-letter characters, so some are leading and some are trailing.

Try it online.

A version which removes non-letter characters is 3 bytes instead:

áΣl

Try it online.

Explanation:

á    # Optional: only leave the letters ([a-zA-Z]) of the (implicit) input-string
 Σ   # Sort the characters in the string by (sorted by their ASCII unicode value):
  l  #  Their lowercase equivalent (in case of the letters)
     # (And output the result implicitly)

Answer 25

Powershell, 36 bytes

-join($args-split'\W|(.)'-ne''|sort)

Test script:

$f = {

-join($args-split'\W|(.)'-ne''|sort)

}

@(
    ,("Johnny walked the dog to the park.", "aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy")
) | % {
    $s,$expected = $_
    $result = &$f $s
    "$("$result"-eq"$expected"): $result"
}

Output:

True: aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy

Answer 26

Julia 1.0, 34 bytes

s->join(sort([s...],by=lowercase))

Try it online!

Answer 27

Arturo, 20 bytes

$=>[arrange&=>lower]

Try it

Answer 28

Japt, 2 bytes

Simply sorts by lowercase

ñv

Try it

Answer 29

Java (JDK), 90 bytes

Not the best Java answer, but i tried to use only inline Stream.

Since the rules aren't clear regarding special characters, here are multiple solutions:

s->s.chars().boxed().sorted((a,b)->a%32-b%32).map(e->""+(char)(e*1)).reduce("",(a,b)->a+b)

returns the correct order for letters, but with special characters mixed in between:

      aaddeeeghhhJkklnn.oooprtttwy

Try it online!

---

Another solution (98 bytes)

s->s.chars().mapToObj(e->""+(char)e).sorted((a,b)->a.compareToIgnoreCase(b)).reduce("",(a,b)->a+b)

returns the correct order for letters, with special characters separated from the letters:

      .aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy

---

And a third solution (122 bytes)

s->s.chars().filter(e->e>64&e<91|e>96&e<123).boxed().sorted((a,b)->a%32-b%32).map(e->""+(char)(e*1)).reduce("",(a,b)->a+b)

returns only the letters, in correct order:

aaddeeeghhhJkklnnoooprtttwy