👀 Views: 459 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-16

javascript sorting arrays JavaScript

I'm wondering if anyone has experience with I just started working with I'm collaborating on a project where I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm trying to sort an array of strings by their lengths in JavaScript, but I'm running into unexpected behavior when some strings are of the same length and when certain edge cases arise. My objective is to sort them in ascending order based on their lengths, using the `sort()` function. Here's the code I've come up with: ```javascript const strings = ['apple', 'banana', 'kiwi', 'fig', 'grape', 'pear', 'orange']; const sorted = strings.sort((a, b) => a.length - b.length); console.log(sorted); ``` This works fine for most cases, and I get the expected output: `['fig', 'pear', 'kiwi', 'grape', 'apple', 'banana', 'orange']`. However, when I add some empty strings and strings of varying whitespace, I notice that the output isn't what I expect. For example: ```javascript const testStrings = ['apple', '', 'banana', ' ', 'kiwi', 'fig', 'grape', 'pear', 'orange']; const sortedTest = testStrings.sort((a, b) => a.length - b.length); console.log(sortedTest); ``` I expect that the empty string should be first, but I see that it gets mixed up with the string containing a single space. The output is `['', ' ', 'fig', 'pear', 'kiwi', 'grape', 'apple', 'banana', 'orange']`, which is confusing because I thought sorting would handle this consistently. Additionally, I'm concerned about performance. If the array grows very large (hundreds of thousands of strings), would this kind of sorting still be efficient? Is there a best practice here to ensure consistent sorting, especially with edge cases like empty or whitespace strings? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! My development environment is Linux. How would you solve this? I appreciate any insights! I'm developing on Ubuntu 20.04 with Javascript. Any pointers in the right direction? Thanks, I really appreciate it!