Generalized Sorting

Sort any kind of data based on user-defined criteria.

Description

QUICKSORT allows the user to sort by any desired criteria. The user passes the data and a comparison function to the QUICKSORT and QUICKSORT returns an indexing vector sorted based on the comparison function.

The comparison function may be an inline function or a function handle. Function handles are an order of magnitude faster than inline functions. I use the TMP_HANDLE utility for creating temporary function handles in MATLAB 6.

QUICKSORT is implemented in m-code and uses a modified quicksort algorithm which sorts by "less than", "equal to" and "greater than". It is much slower than the builtin sort function, but also much more flexible.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 5.2 (R10)
• Other requirements: Requires Matlab 6 or higher for function handle usage.

[Steve Block]

doesn't work

[Urban Novak]

Thans, it works perfectly.

[Miks Böllér]

if it "doesnt work", maybe its just you who couldnt use it... have you read the comments in m file?

[Guido Longoni]

Thank you very much!

[Joe Daz]

This function uses two arguments instead of one (a 1xn vector). Complicated if you just want to sort a simple vector.

[Jan Moringen]

I used the quicksort function with a cellarray of objects and a comparison-function that compared a specific attribute of the objects. It worked nicely. I like how the source array is not touched but a list of indices is returned instead.

[Matthew]