JS Sort Function for integers

[mild gazelle]

How does Javascript sort for integers actually work ?
The negative numbers are sorted in descending while 0 and positives are in ascending, why is that so ?
Also, how can I fix that ?

[copper igloo]

huh

Thats how maths work

They are all ascending

Ascending means smallest to biggest

Oh I apologize

[mild gazelle]

-1 > -3

[copper igloo]

My mistake

So weird.

[errant rain]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/sort#description

[mild gazelle]

I got the explanation for it.

[errant rain]

Doesn't sort numerically by default

[copper igloo]

Okay thanks

[copper igloo]

YUP THIS

[mild gazelle]

its ASCII

[mild gazelle]

but why ASCII sort was used when people usually consider sort as numeric and not ASCII

[copper igloo]

If u wanna do by numbers, do this

let arr = [1, 5, 3, 6, -5, -3];
arr.sort((a, b) => a - b);
console.log(arr);

//[ -5, -3, 1, 3, 5, 6 ]```

Pretty much to compare all you need to do is return a negative number or positive number, if number is negative that means is a is smaller than b and if number which u return is positive it means a is greater than b and then the sort fuction sorts according to that therefore instead of writing a bunch of if statements, a-b is a much shorter solution

[errant rain]

No idea. I'm sure there was some historical reason, but you can't go around changing these sorts of things easily regardless of expectations because there's so much browser code built off that spec.

[mild gazelle]

Can you explain the function : (a, b) => a - b ?

[copper igloo]

Yes

Basically

Lets assume a is 6

and b is 4

[mild gazelle]

with respect to the array you took

[copper igloo]

a-b which is 6-4 will return a positive number which means a is bigger than b

[copper igloo]

Okay thats pretty long but if u take array [3,-12,4,5]

Then

The sort function will run the callback function for each pair in the array

Which means

[mild gazelle]

each possible pair of 2 numbers and feed it to the arrow function to get a- b ?

[copper igloo]

It will run the callback function (a, b) => a - b first for a=3, b=-12 then we do return a-b in the function so thats 3-(-12) so thats 3+12 so thats 15 which is a positive number we dont care that its 15 we just care that its a positive number, since it returns a positive number it means a is bigger than b so b will be put first and then a and then the next pair it picks is 3,4

[copper igloo]

I think so, yes.

[copper igloo]

This will sort ascendingly if u wanna do dscendingly then u can do b-a

[mild gazelle]

Thanks @copper igloo @errant rain for the help 😃

!solved

[copper igloo]

Welcome