Illustration of Sorting strings:

To sort on the rows rather than second dimension should be specified.

>> sort(words,2)

ans =

Hello

Hdowy

Hi

Gbdeooy

Caio

It can be shown by this that the blank space comes before the letters of the alphabet in the character encoding, and that the uppercase letters also come before the lowercase letters.

Now the question is how the strings be sorted alphabetically? The MATLAB has a function sortrows which will do this. The way it works is that it checks the strings column-by-column beginning from the left. If it can establish which letter comes first, it picks up the whole string and puts it in the first row. In this illustration, the first two strings are placed depend on the first character, C and G. For other three strings, they all start with H so the later column is examined. In this situation the strings are placed depend on the second character, e, i, o.

>> sortrows(words)

ans =

Ciao

Goodbye

Hello

Hi

Howdy