Deeply Sort Nested Ruby Arrays and Hashes

If you’ve ever scripted in Ruby before, you’ve more than likely encountered deeply nested arrays and hashes. These nested structures often come from Ruby’s JSON parser, but Ruby itself doesn’t have effective methods for dealing with them. Specifically, sorting these structures: the standard routine only shallow sorts the top layer instead of deeply sorting every nested array and hash that the structure contains. This issue became apparent in Cumulus—an open source project sponsored by Lucid Software. After being unable to find an adequate solution, a simple utility was made that deeply sorts nested structures. Although small, the utility was incredibly useful—so it was made into a standalone Ruby Gem.

[
  {
    "name": "Steve",
    "relatives": [
      "Ray",
      "Mark",
      "Jeff",
      "David"
    ]
  },
  {
    "relatives": [
      "Mary",
      "Joe",
      "Harry"
    ],
    "name": "John"
  }
]

require “deepsort”
require “json”
result = JSON.parse(File.read("nasty.json")).deep_sort
puts JSON.pretty_generate(result)

[
  {
    "name": "John",
    "relatives": [
      "Harry",
      "Joe",
      "Mary"
    ]
  },
  {
    "name": "Steve",
    "relatives": [
      "David",
      "Jeff",
      "Mark",
      "Ray"
    ]
  }
]

But wait—the goodness doesn't stop there! The gem also includes in-place and configurable methods such as deep_sort!, deep_sort_by, and deep_sort_by!, similar to ruby's built-in sort!, sort_by, and sort_by!

gem install deepsort

The deepsort gem is Open Source (MIT license). Feel free to contribute, comment, or learn more on the project's GitHub page.