Sorting Built-in Types in Go

Introduction

The Go programming language provides a built-in package named sort that implements sorting for builtins and user-defined types. In this lab, we will focus on sorting for builtins.

Skills Graph

Sorting

The problem to be solved in this lab is to sort slices of strings and integers using the sort package.

• The sort package must be imported.
• The sort.Strings() function must be used to sort a slice of strings.
• The sort.Ints() function must be used to sort a slice of integers.
• The sort.IntsAreSorted() function must be used to check if a slice of integers is already sorted.

## Running our program prints the sorted string and int
## slices and `true` as the result of our `AreSorted` test.
$ go run sorting.go
Strings: [a b c]
Ints: [2 4 7]
Sorted: true

There is the full code below:

// Go's `sort` package implements sorting for builtins
// and user-defined types. We'll look at sorting for
// builtins first.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"sort"
)

func main() {

	// Sort methods are specific to the builtin type;
	// here's an example for strings. Note that sorting is
	// in-place, so it changes the given slice and doesn't
	// return a new one.
	strs := []string{"c", "a", "b"}
	sort.Strings(strs)
	fmt.Println("Strings:", strs)

	// An example of sorting `int`s.
	ints := []int{7, 2, 4}
	sort.Ints(ints)
	fmt.Println("Ints:   ", ints)

	// We can also use `sort` to check if a slice is
	// already in sorted order.
	s := sort.IntsAreSorted(ints)
	fmt.Println("Sorted: ", s)
}

Summary

The sort package in Go provides a simple and efficient way to sort slices of built-in types. By using the sort.Strings(), sort.Ints(), and sort.IntsAreSorted() functions, we can easily sort and check if a slice is already sorted.