feat(orderBy): Support natural sort

[gabrielmaldi]

This is a feature request. I searched issues and pull request and didn't find anything, sorry if this is a dupe.

I think that many of us would like to be able to ask orderBy to sort strings in a "natural" way (i.e. foo 92 "is smaller than" foo 147, as opposed to the current lexicographical order which sorts 1 before 9).

I'd be willing to submit a pull request but first I'd like to know if this is a feature the Angular team would like to add, discuss the possible syntax, and get some guidelines (I took a look at orderByFilter and noticed it's really optimized for performance).

Thanks!

[lgalfaso]

This is one of those things and always found a reasonable workaround (eg
for this case, (+somefield.substr(4))), but would be open to it if there is
enough community interest

[Ericson578]

Maybe a new filter that converts to integer before ordering? orderByInt()

[fhernandezn]

@Narretz I'd like to know your oppinion about this feature, I could create a new filter.

[Ericson578]

I've definitely run into this problem before, where I have a field that I want to order by in an ng-repeat, and the field is a number but for a variety of reasons is stored in js as a string. I've fixed the problem by writing a custom filter that converts to int before comparing using parseInt(num, 2), but would be nice if there was already a filter that did this.

[gkalpak]

Is it just me or does this sound like a better fit for an external module (rather than a core feature) ?