Sort a list by a certain word

Question

I need to sort a list of array by a particular word. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

 List=[microphone,phone,telephone,mobilephone]
    
 word="pho"

Answer should be,

answer=[phone,telephone,microphone,mobilephone]

Answer 1

You can use the indexOf() to get an index number and pass that to the sort method.

const list = ["microphone", "phone", "telephone", "mobilephone"];

const sortBySubstring = (words, match) => {
  return words.sort((a, b) => {
    return a.indexOf(match) - b.indexOf(match);
  });
}

const result = sortBySubstring(list, "pho");

console.log(result);

EDIT:

If there is a word in your list that doesn't contain the substring it will be placed at the beginning of the array. There are some ways to change this behaviour.

First of all you could check if it exists with includes(), if it doesn't exist put it at the end the array

const list = ["microphone", "phone", "telephone", "mobilephone", "telemobile"];

const sortBySubstring = (words, match) => {
  return words.sort((a, b) => {
    if(!a.includes(match) || !b.includes(match)) return 1;
    
    return a.indexOf(match) - b.indexOf(match);
  });
}

const result = sortBySubstring(list, "pho");

console.log(result);

Another option is to filter() out words that don't contain your given substring

const list = ["microphone", "phone", "telephone", "mobilephone", "telemobile"];

const sortBySubstring = (words, match) => {
  const contains = words.filter((word) => word.includes(match));

  return contains.sort((a, b) => {
    return a.indexOf(match) - b.indexOf(match);
  });
}

const result = sortBySubstring(list, "pho");

console.log(result);

Answer 2

Little bit longer than the answer by Reyno but it moves strings that don't exist in the array to the end.

// The following function was taken from here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16096872/how-to-sort-2-dimensional-array-by-column-value (answer by jahroy)
function compareSecondColumn(a, b) {
    if (a[1] === b[1]) {
        return 0;
    }
    else {
        return (a[1] < b[1]) ? -1 : 1;
    }
}


function sortByWord(list, word) {
    // put data into 2d array (x) with array item and indexOf search term
  var x = [];
  var doesntContainWord = [];
  for (var i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
    if (list[i].indexOf(word) == -1) {
        // if the search word doesn't exist, push to array
      doesntContainWord.push(list[i]);
    } else {
        x[i] = [list[i], list[i].indexOf(word)];
    }
  }
  doesntContainWord.sort();
  // now sort var x by second col.
  x.sort(compareSecondColumn);
  // now dump values back into array and return them
  var toReturn = [];
  for (var i = 0; i < x.length; i++)     {
    toReturn[i] = x[i][0];
  }
  return toReturn.concat(doesntContainWord);
}

var data = ["microphone", "phone", "telephone", "mobilephone", "cat", "animal"];

console.log(sortByWord(data, "pho"))