Sorting Elements with jQuery

Whilst refactoring a jQuery plugin today, I came across a method that placed a list item into an unordered list at a specific point, so that all the items remained in alphabetic order. This long method seemed completely convoluted and slow to me and I decided that there must be an easier way to keep the list in alphabetical order.

There are existing plugins for sorting elements but I never like to just pile on the 3rd party plugins as that means more javascript files to include in a page. Besides, I was sure it should not be difficult.

It soon occured to me that jQuery has the built-in ability to return the elements as an array, using the .get() method and from there, it was not too long before I had my streamlined code to sort the list element alphabetically:

var mylist = $('ul');
var listitems = mylist.children('li').get();
listitems.sort(function(a, b) {
   var compA = $(a).text().toUpperCase();
   var compB = $(b).text().toUpperCase();
   return (compA < compB) ? -1 : (compA > compB) ? 1 : 0;
})
$.each(listitems, function(idx, itm) { mylist.append(itm); });

I utilise the javascript array.sort method to sort the elements in the array and then using the jQuery append() method,  reorder them in the actual list element.