Sorting an array in descending order in Ruby

Question

I have an array of hashes like following

[
  { :foo => 'foo', :bar => 2 },
  { :foo => 'foo', :bar => 3 },
  { :foo => 'foo', :bar => 5 },
]

I am trying to sort above array in descending order according to the value of :bar in each hash.

I am using sort_by like following to sort above array.

a.sort_by { |h| h[:bar] }

However above sorts the array in ascending order. How do I make it sort in descending order?

One solution was to do following:

a.sort_by { |h| -h[:bar] }

But that negative sign does not seem appropriate. Any views?

Answer 1

For those folks who like to measure speed in IPS ;)

require 'benchmark/ips'

ary = []
1000.times { 
  ary << {:bar => rand(1000)} 
}

Benchmark.ips do |x|
  x.report("sort")               { ary.sort{ |a,b| b[:bar] <=> a[:bar] } }
  x.report("sort reverse")       { ary.sort{ |a,b| a[:bar] <=> b[:bar] }.reverse }
  x.report("sort_by -a[:bar]")   { ary.sort_by{ |a| -a[:bar] } }
  x.report("sort_by a[:bar]*-1") { ary.sort_by{ |a| a[:bar]*-1 } }
  x.report("sort_by.reverse!")   { ary.sort_by{ |a| a[:bar] }.reverse }
  x.compare!
end

And results:

Warming up --------------------------------------
                sort    93.000  i/100ms
        sort reverse    91.000  i/100ms
    sort_by -a[:bar]   382.000  i/100ms
  sort_by a[:bar]*-1   398.000  i/100ms
    sort_by.reverse!   397.000  i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
                sort    938.530  (± 1.8%) i/s -      4.743k in   5.055290s
        sort reverse    901.157  (± 6.1%) i/s -      4.550k in   5.075351s
    sort_by -a[:bar]      3.814k (± 4.4%) i/s -     19.100k in   5.019260s
  sort_by a[:bar]*-1      3.732k (± 4.3%) i/s -     18.706k in   5.021720s
    sort_by.reverse!      3.928k (± 3.6%) i/s -     19.850k in   5.060202s

Comparison:
    sort_by.reverse!:     3927.8 i/s
    sort_by -a[:bar]:     3813.9 i/s - same-ish: difference falls within error
  sort_by a[:bar]*-1:     3732.3 i/s - same-ish: difference falls within error
                sort:      938.5 i/s - 4.19x  slower
        sort reverse:      901.2 i/s - 4.36x  slower