Sorting and spaces.

[Peter Otten]

Tobiah wrote:

> I had a case today where I needed to sort two string:
> 
> ['Awards', 'Award Winners']
> 
> I consulted a few sources to get a suggestion as to
> what would be correct.  My first idea was to throw them
> through a Linux command line sort:
> 
> Awards
> Award Winners
> 
> Then I did some Googling, and found that most US systems seem
> to prefer that one ignore spaces when alphabetizing.  The sort
> program seemed to agree.
> 
> I put the items into the database that way, but I had forgotten
> that my applications used python to sort them anyway.  The result
> was different:
> 
> >>> a = ['Awards', 'Award Winners']
> >>> sorted(a)
> ['Award Winners', 'Awards']
> 
> So python evaluated the space as a lower ASCII value.
> 
> Thoughts?  Are there separate tools for alphabetizing
> rather then sorting?

>>> items = ["Awards", "Award Winners", "awards"]
>>> sorted(items)
['Award Winners', 'Awards', 'awards']
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8")
'en_US.UTF-8'
>>> sorted(items, key=locale.strxfrm)
['awards', 'Awards', 'Award Winners']
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "C")
'C'
>>> sorted(items, key=locale.strxfrm)
['Award Winners', 'Awards', 'awards']