Instance Method

sort()

Sorts the collection in place.

Declaration

mutating func sort()
Available when Element conforms to Comparable.

Discussion

You can sort any mutable collection of elements that conform to the Comparable protocol by calling this method. Elements are sorted in ascending order.

Here’s an example of sorting a list of students’ names. Strings in Swift conform to the Comparable protocol, so the names are sorted in ascending order according to the less-than operator (<).

var students = ["Kofi", "Abena", "Peter", "Kweku", "Akosua"]
students.sort()
print(students)
// Prints "["Abena", "Akosua", "Kofi", "Kweku", "Peter"]"

To sort the elements of your collection in descending order, pass the greater-than operator (>) to the sort(by:) method.

students.sort(by: >)
print(students)
// Prints "["Peter", "Kweku", "Kofi", "Akosua", "Abena"]"

The sorting algorithm is not guaranteed to be stable. A stable sort preserves the relative order of elements that compare equal.

Complexity: O(n log n), where n is the length of the collection.