Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
- Subject: Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
- From: Chris Page <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 23:26:19 -0700
On Monday, October 7, 2002, at 06:54 PM, Shane Stanley wrote:
I disagree, at least in this case. The original query I made was
about "how things like high-ASCII characters are handled" by the
sort command. In that context, the character set involved is
irrelevant to the question, and only relevant to the answer if
such characters can be handled at all (ie, the answer might well
be that it treats them as MacRoman, or whatever).
If the topic is how to sort data, then the format of that data is
entirely relevant. When sorting "text", the encoding, character
set, and language of that "text" are the most important things one
needs to know. The sorting behavior, or lack thereof, will depend
completely upon the contents of the "text" and the capabilities of
the software that operates upon it.
For example, if "sort" handles only ASCII characters and your data
contains any non-ASCII characters, well, obviously they won't get
sorted as desired. If "sort" handles MacRoman, but your "text" is
Unicode stored in either UTF-8 or UTF-16, again you may not get the
desired results.
But this is getting too abstract for an AppleScript list, and has
little to do with answering the original question, so I'll stop
here.
I'm sorry the term "high-ASCII" seems to offend, but it seems to
me that its meaning on a Mac mailing list is pretty obvious,
something that all the replies seem to confirm.
It doesn't offend me in the least. It just makes technical
communication less clear. Read my signature. More to the point,
assuming that any "text" under discussion consists of MacRoman
characters is generally a bug waiting to happen, especially since
Unicode use is on the rise.
But I wasn't attempting to single you out. I was just trying to
make something clear that has become muddied over time, and the
topic happened to come up on this thread.
--
Chris Page - Mac Guy - Palm, Inc.
This is software development we're talking about here.
"Picky" is our mantra.
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