Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
- Subject: Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
- From: John Delacour <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 23:32:01 +0100
- Mac-eudora-version: 5.3 alpha
At 12:11 pm -0700 5/10/02, bill fancher wrote:
Is it Unicode happy (as in AS's Unicode text)?
I've been hoping some Unicode expert would answer. AFAIK sort isn't
Unicode happy, at least in the sense that it doesn't correctly
recognize a string in two different encodings, or with two different
"spellings", as being the same. But in this particular case, Finder
screws things up before sort gets a chance to.
I'm not sure what either of you mean by sorting in Unicode, even if
you're talking of the Latin-1 part of the table, let alone other
languages. I doubt if there is yet any routine in existence to to an
alphabetical or lexical sort of polytonic Greek and the same goes
probably even for a list of European words. I must say I've not
investigated the possibility very deeply, but I'd imagine special
routines would be needed for each language. Hanzi/Kanji are arranged
according to stroke count. Whether anyone has even begun writing
routines to sort according to pinyin or Japanese Roman, I doubt very
much.
Since the Finder uses combining characters for accents and not
pre-composed characters, the sorting of files in the Finder is
theoretically that much simpler, but the whole business seems to me
extremely complicated and probably quite impossible. There are
probably pages at the Unicode site where these questions are dealt
with -- and for the sake of my mental health I don't plan to visit
them.
JD
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