Examples

The following example shows how to use the permutation p to print the elements of the vector v in ascending order,

gsl_sort_vector_index (p, v);

for (i = 0; i < v->size; i++)
{
    double vpi = gsl_vector_get(v, p->data[i]);
    printf("order = %d, value = %g\n", i, vpi);
}

The next example uses the function gsl_sort_smallest to select the 5 smallest numbers from 100000 uniform random variates stored in an array,

#include <gsl/gsl_rng.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_sort_double.h>

int
main (void)
{
  const gsl_rng_type * T;
  gsl_rng * r;

  int i, k = 5, N = 100000;

  double * x = malloc (N * sizeof(double));
  double * small = malloc (k * sizeof(double));

  gsl_rng_env_setup();

  T = gsl_rng_default;
  r = gsl_rng_alloc (T);

  for (i = 0; i < N; i++)
    {
      x[i] = gsl_rng_uniform(r);
    }

  gsl_sort_smallest (small, k, x, 1, N);

  printf("%d smallest values from %d\n", k, N);

  for (i = 0; i < k; i++)
    {
      printf ("%d: %.18f\n", i, small[i]);
    }
  return 0;
}

The output lists the 5 smallest values, in ascending order,

$ ./a.out 
5 smallest values from 100000
0: 0.000005466630682349
1: 0.000012384494766593
2: 0.000017581274732947
3: 0.000025131041184068
4: 0.000031369971111417