DataArray.sort_values()

[raybellwaves]

When going through https://github.com/raybellwaves/PyData-Portland-2021-talk/blob/main/talk.ipynb someone asked about the syntax of da_1d.sortby(da_1d). It may help to have a DataArray.sort_values method which works on 1d arrays which wraps da_1d.sortby(da_1d)

Adding will be helpful for pandas users but does duplicate an existing method/API

[max-sixty]

I agree that da_1d.sortby(da_1d) could be simpler. Some options:

• da_1d.sortby() could work for 1d arrays? Generally we try to not special-case by dimension number though
• da_1d.sortby(lambda x: x) could be a nice general solution (it's already possible to pass lambdas to methods like where), though maybe not that friendly to newcomers.

I'm not sure it's worth another method — as you point out — it duplicates another method, and could make it confusing on which to use.

What are your thoughts @raybellwaves ?

[raybellwaves]

I think it's fine as it. Part of my posting is in learning the difference API across the ecosystem. e.g. in numpy it's sort https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.sort.html and pandas it's sort_values https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.sort_values.html and sort_index https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.sort_index.html. I think xarray's sortby encompasses these. There's a page in the docs for this as well: http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/user-guide/reshaping.html#sort

[dcherian]

You could add an entry to https://xarray.pydata.org/en/latest/howdoi.html maybe that helps. And also a docstring example.