SORTSET (v2.0)

Sort a set according to a user-defined order

SORTSET Sort a set according to a user-defined order

For vectors, R = SORTSET(S,ORDER) sorts a set S according to the order specified by ORDER. If elements of S are not present in ORDER they will be put at the end of R in the original order.
For matrices, SORTSET(S,ORDER) sorts each column of S, and for N-D arrays, SORTSET(S,ORDER) sorts the elements along the first non-singleton dimension of S.

SORTSET(S,ORDER,DIM) sorts along the dimension DIM.

[R, I, J] = SORTSET(S, ORDER) returns index vectors so that R equals S(I), and R(J) equals S. R, I, and J have the same size as S.

S and ORDER can be cell arrays of strings.

Examples:
% Sort numbers in a self-defined order: first 80-100, than reverse
% odd first, than rest
S = ceil(rand(1,10)*100) % 10 random numbers
ORDER = [80:100 99:-2:1 1:100] ;
R = sortset(S,ORDER)

% sort a list of words (with the word 'xxx' not in the list)
S = {'bb','a','dd','a','cc','dd','xxx','cc','e','bb'}
[R,I,J] = sortset(S, {'a','e','bb','dd','cc'})
isequal(R,S(I)), isequal(R(J),S)

% sort the list of words along columns
S = {'bb','a','dd','a','cc' ; 'dd','dd','cc','e','bb'}
R = sortset(S,{'a','e','bb','dd','cc'},2)

Notes:
- If an element occurs multiple times in ORDER, the first occurence is taken as its rank. For instance, when ORDER is [20 13 1 13] and S is [13 1] the result will be [13 1] and not [1 13].
- The functionality is similar to, but more convenient than something like:
S = {'bb','a','dd','a','cc','dd','dd','cc','e','bb'}
Ranks = [3 1 4 1 5 4 4 5 2 3] ;
[SRanks, si] = sort(Ranks) ; R2 = S(si)