Efficient string sorting algorithm

Question

Sorting strings by comparisons (e.g. standard QuickSort + strcmp-like function) may be a bit slow, especially for long strings sharing a common prefix (the comparison function takes O(s) time, where s is the length of string), thus a standard solution has the complexity of O(s * nlog n). Are there any known faster algorithms?

Answer 1

If you know that the string consist only of certain characters (which is almost always the case), you can use a variant of BucketSort or RadixSort.