RE: [xsl] sort and collating sequence

["Michael Kay" <michael dot h dot kay at ntlworld dot com>]

I'm amused by this posting, because I've had a tough job persuading some of
my colleagues in W3C that there was a requirement for
"codepoint-order-collating" as well as collating in "natural language
order".

If you have a good reason to want strings to be collated according to their
Unicode encodings, it would be valuable if you could explain the requirement
and post it to www-xpath-comments@w3.org.  The XPath 2.0 (and XSLT 2.0)
drafts include enhanced facilities for controlling collating sequences.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@ntlworld.com
work: Michael.Kay@softwareag.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@lists.mulberrytech.com
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@lists.mulberrytech.com]On Behalf Of Paul Bell
> Sent: 25 February 2002 18:19
> To: xsl-list@lists.mulberrytech.com
> Subject: [xsl] sort and collating sequence
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> I recently scoured the xsl-list digest in search of
> information about how
> the several xsl:sort implementations construe
> the notion of a 'collating sequence'.  My own observation is
> that xsl:sort
> (msxml3 at least) does a kind of 'semantic sorting'.
> For example, the values:
>
> aaa
> bbb
> ccc
> AAA
> BBB
> CCC
>
> sorted order="ascending" data-type="text" are presented as:
>
> aaa
> AAA
> bbb
> BBB
> ccc
> CCC
>
> I work at a company that knows a little about sorting and I find this
> sequence odd. Shouldn't it be:
>
> AAA
> BBB
> CCC
> aaa
> bbb
> ccc
>
> To put a fine point on it, isn't the ascending sequence in UTF-8:
>
> x'414141'
> x'424242'
> x'434343'
> x'616161'
> x'626262'
> x'636363'
>
> ??
>
> This behavior seems so wrong to me, yet it is so unremarked
> in the digest
> that I feel I must be missing something huge. Can anyone shed
> any light on
> the correctness of this behavior? Is it unique to
> msxml3? Can one use xsl:sort to produce what seems to me the proper
> sequence?
>
> Thank you.
>
> -Paul
>
>
>
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>


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