merge_sort_cpp

Custom implementation of the merge sort algorithm in C++ using standard library only.

Made for educational purposes.

Description

The data being processed in this implementation has a format of (k,v) pair, where k is an integer and v is a string of any length. The sorting is done by these pairs in the ascending order.

So for instance, while having an input of:

4
3 log
2 log log
1 loglog
0 logloglog

..the resulting data would be the following:

4
0 logloglog
1 loglog
2 log log
3 log

The return code of the implementation is:

• 0 if all works as expected;
• 1 if user-specified arguments do not match the pattern;
• 2 if input file is unreadable or writing output is not possible;
• 3 if the input data format is incorrect.

Compiling

This implementation can be compiled with g++:

g++ src/main.cpp -o merge_sort

This will produce an executable file named merge_sort.

Usage

Below is a sample command of using this implementation:

./merge_sort input.txt output.txt

Here, input.txt is an existing file with initial data, while output.txt is the name of the file that will be created to contain the sort result.

References

• Wikipedia: Description of the merge sort algorithm.