Natural Sort Order In Javascript

Natural sort order is the order humans want data in. Standard string sorting is often a poor user experience.

Take an array.

["2", "100", "10", "20", "20 SC", "1"];

Standard string sorting will result in this order.

["1", "10", "100", "2", "20", "20 SC"];

We don't want "100" to come before "2".

Thankfully it's easy to sort arrays in Javascript with natural sort order using localeCompare.

const arr = ["2", "100", "10", "20", "20 SC", "1"];
arr.sort((a, b) => {
  return a.localeCompare(b, undefined, { numeric: true });
});

This results in an array in this order.

["1", "2", "10", "20", "20 SC", "100"];