Table sorting – case sensitivity issue

[davidwag]

Xmetal Author Enterprise 8 – sorting a table where some items begin with a capital letter, some with lowercase, and some with two initial capital letters causes sorting errors (first all init caps are sorted, then init lowercase; an entry with two init caps would come before an entry without, e.g., “MS” comes before “Ma”. Apparently this is normal “ASCII” sorting but it isn't normal human sorting. I tried selecting “natural” but it didn't help.

Ideas?

Reply

[Derek Read]

The table sorting uses Unicode character order (so you are sort of correct in assuming ASCII).

One example that the “natural” sort gives you is a1, a2, a10, a37, a100, a200 (whereas the text sort would give you a1, a10, a100, a2, a37).

I'll discuss the possibility of implementing something language-specific with the development team. I think we can assume that English would be the priority (at least for any first pass of such a feature) but even English has different rules for sorting depending on who is asking (and sometimes on the content — think names starting with Mc and Mac for example) so I think anything that is implemented would likely need to be flexible and configurable.

Then there are other languages too of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order#Language-specific_conventions

Reply

[Author]

Posts