Bug: Doesn't natural sort integers

[forthrin]

$ printf "19\n187\n1765\n" |  youplot count
        ┌                                        ┐ 
   1765 ┤■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 1.0   
    187 ┤■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 1.0   
     19 ┤■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 1.0   
        └                                        ┘ 

PS! Agree that #44 should be fixed, and prompted fixed upstream. If upstream refuses, break with upstream.

PPS! Post links to alternative plot libraries that get things right.

[kojix2]

Hi @forthrin

I don’t think labels not being natural-sorted is a bug. It seems intentional behavior.
The spec is written that way too, and honestly, writing a natural sort implementation is not easy for me.

Nowadays, we can have tools like Codex and Claude generate code and cross-review it, so I went ahead and did that.
(YouPlot is used by people outside the Ruby community as well, so I want to avoid adding gem dependencies as much as possible)

If you have any suggestions for improvement, I’d be happy to see a pull request.
Thanks.

[kojix2]

[forthrin]

These are obviously values, not labels. Anyway, with these dependencies on both other libraries and AI it's probably quicker to RMO or find another tool.

[kojix2]

No, these are labels, not values.

[forthrin]

OK, so you define anything that's being counted as labels, because they could just as well be strings? Explain...

[kojix2]

These are typically referred to as y-axis data labels. When we talk about “values,” we usually mean the heights of the bars in a bar chart. This is about chart terminology.

[forthrin]

🥔

Tested from Git HEAD and now works with supplied example at least. Would also appreciate to get rid of excess .0.

[kojix2]

Unlike bar charts, counts are always integers, so it’s fine to display "value labels" as integers. I’ll take care of it.

[kojix2]

Updated the count subcommand to display value labels as Integer.
Please let us know if you encounter any issues.

[forthrin]

Thanks for the kind and swift reach-out, but were we talking about different things? Still trailing .0:

# da6351c Fri Apr 10 14:54:38 2026 +0900 (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD)
$ printf "19\n187\n1765" | sort -n | ./exe/youplot count
        ┌                                        ┐ 
     19 ┤■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 1.0   
    187 ┤■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 1.0   
   1765 ┤■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 1.0   
        └                                        ┘ 

[kojix2]

exe/uplot is just a Ruby script with a shebang that does require "youplot" .
So I think the system-installed youplot is being prioritized.

Rewriting this to require_relative '../lib/youplot' might make it work, but that is not commonly done.
Usually, it is better to reinstall from source like this:

git clone https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot/
cd YouPlot
rake install

Nowadays, many people start programming with statically typed languages, so Ruby’s traditional style may feel less intuitive...

[forthrin]

WFM 🤦‍♂️