sorting a ruby array of objects by an attribute that could be nil

Question

I have an array of objects that I need to sort by a position attribute that could be an integer or nil, and I need the objects that have the nil position to be at the end of the array. Now, I can force the position to return some value rather than nil so that the array.sort doesn't fail, but if I use 0 as this default, then it puts those objects at the front of the sort. What's the best way to to do this sort? should I just set the nil values to some ridiculously high number that is 'almost' always guaranteed to be at the end? or is there some other way i could cause the array.sort method to put the nil attribute objects at the end of the array? the code looks like this:

class Parent
  def sorted_children
     children.sort{|a, b| a.position <=> b.position}
  end
end

class Child
  def position
    category ? category.position : #what should the else be??
  end
end

now, if i make the 'else' something like 1000000000, then it's most likely gonna put them at the end of the array, but I don't like this solution as it's arbitrary

Answer 1

I would just tweak your sort to put nil items last. Try something like this.

foo = [nil, -3, 100, 4, 6, nil, 4, nil, 23]

foo.sort { |a,b| a && b ? a <=> b : a ? -1 : 1 }

=> [-3, 4, 4, 6, 23, 100, nil, nil, nil]

That says: if a and b are both non-nil sort them normally but if one of them is nil, return a status that sorts that one larger.