You are correct. names.sort! will modify the original list, which is probably not what is desired by this method.

Yeah, cbean, that's a bug that I also came across -- it strips out anything that looks like an XML tag. That sucks, because assigning matched groups to variables is one of my favorite Ruby regex features!

As far as I'm aware, this will also change the array passed into the function, rather than just returning a sorted version.

Hmm, I just tested it in irb. Looks like when you subtract two objects from the Time class, the difference is a float.

1.9.3p429 :007 > start_time = Time.new(2000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1) ; end_time = Time.new(2000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 2) ; (start_time - end_time).class
=> Float

Yep, that was the prob -- I was uppercasing the first word. Thanks!

Apologies, I was returning a string instead of just the matched variable. All's good.

Looks like the comments strip out greater/less than symbols. Here's the full function that's working locally for me (I think!): http://pastebin.com/t0czVp7V