How to reverse sort an array

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    May 28th 2019

Regular sorting on comparable data is as easy as calling the sort() method, but if you want a reverse sort – e.g. highest to lowest numbers, or Z-A alphabetically – there are two options.

The first is to run a regular sort, reverse that sort, then convert the result to an array. For example:

let numbers = [100, 5, 53, 98, 29]
let reversed1 = Array(numbers.sorted().reversed())

The second option is to provide a custom closure to the sorted() method that sorts the opposite way to the default, like this:

let reversed2 = numbers.sorted { $0 > $1 }

Both of those will result in the array 100, 98, 53, 29, 5.

Available from iOS 8.0

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