naturalCompare

Comparing values the way a reader expects, for sorting tables, navs and lists.

import { naturalCompare } from 'tosijs-ui'

const rows = ['9', '399', '1200', '3.5', '40']
preview.textContent = rows.slice().sort(naturalCompare).join(', ')
// 3.5, 9, 40, 399, 1200   — not 1200, 3.5, 399, 40, 9

A raw > compares strings lexically, so any column of numeric strings sorts by first digit — and real data is full of them: CSV and TSV imports, BigQuery exports, JSON where numbers arrived as strings, anything id-shaped. '9' > '399' is true.

naturalCompare handles three things a naive comparator gets wrong:

• numeric strings sort numerically, including decimals and negatives
• very long integers stay exact — two 20-digit ids differing in the last digit compare correctly, where parseFloat would round both to the same double
• accented letters follow the reader's locale, so Finnish and Swedish order them the way their readers expect rather than the way ASCII does

Blank values (null, undefined, '') sort last in both directions — a descending sort that opens on a screenful of empty cells is never what was clicked for.