Manpages - radixsort.3bsd

(See

for include usage.)

The

and

functions are implementations of radix sort.

These functions sort an

element array of pointers to byte strings, with the initial member of which is referenced by

The byte strings may contain any values. End of strings is denoted by character which has same weight as user specified value

has to be between 0 and 255.

Applications may specify a sort order by providing the

argument. If

must reference an array of

• 1 bytes which contains the sort weight of each possible byte value.

The end-of-string byte must have a sort weight of 0 or 255 (for sorting in reverse order). More than one byte may have the same sort weight. The

argument is useful for applications which wish to sort different characters equally, for example, providing a table with the same weights for A-Z as for a-z will result in a case-insensitive sort. If

is NULL, the contents of the array are sorted in ascending order according to the

order of the byte strings they reference and

has a sorting weight of 0.

The

function is stable, that is, if two elements compare as equal, their order in the sorted array is unchanged. The

function uses additional memory sufficient to hold

pointers.

The

function is not stable, but uses no additional memory.

These functions are variants of most-significant-byte radix sorting; in particular, see

and section 5.2.5, exercise 10. They take linear time relative to the number of bytes in the strings.

The value of the

element of

is not 0 or 255.

Additionally, the

function may fail and set

for any of the errors specified for the library routine

The

function first appeared in