ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

Name

Array.sort( ) Method — sort the elements of an array

Availability

Flash 5

Synopsis

array.sort( )
array.sort(compareFunction)

Arguments

compareFunction

A function that dictates how to sort array.

Description

When invoked without any arguments, the sort( ) method temporarily converts the elements of array to strings and orders the elements according to the code points of those strings (approximately alphabetical order). Alphabetic comparisons and code points are described in “Character order and alphabetic comparisons” in Chapter 4.

When invoked with a compareFunction argument, sort( ) reorders the elements of array according to the return value of compareFunction, which is a user-defined function that dictates how to arrange any two values in the array. Your user-defined compareFunction should be designed to accept two array elements as arguments. It should return a negative number if the first element should come before the second element; it should return a positive number if the first element should come after the second element; and it should return a if the elements should not be reordered. If additional elements are added to the array after it has been sorted, they are not added in sorted order. You must resort the array to reorder any newly added elements. Note that numbers are sorted according to their Latin 1 code points by default. Chapter 11 explains how to sort numbers by their numeric values.

Example

The following example sorts an array of movie clips according to their horizontal ...