On 18/01/11 07:41, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2011/1/17 Tim
Starling<tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
* It automatically drops accents, since accented
letters sort the same
as unaccented letters (at the primary level).
How locale aware is it? For example,
in Swedish accented letters come
at the end of the alphabet and in Lithuanian I, Į and Y are collated
together as if they were one letter. There are many quirks of this
kind in other languages.
It's not locale-aware. As I said, it's a
compromise collation. I was
hoping that other people might be interested in adding support for
specific locales, that's part of the reason for my post. ICU supports
lots of different locales, and there is locale-specific collation data
in the CLDR.
And i don't know what to do when in the
Lithuanian Wikipedia you sort
names of places in the UK - should Islington come before or after
York?
Before.
$collator = new Collator('lt')
print $collator->compare( 'Islington', 'York' )
-1
But more interestingly, York goes before London:
print $collator->compare( 'York',
'London' )
-1
I think attempting to do it any other way would be a lot of trouble,
and not what is wanted anyway. To put the question another way: on the
English Wikipedia, should Kybartai sort before Klaipėda? I would think
not.
I've seen sorting accent insensitive and so for example "Bańka"
would be
sorted as if it was "Banka", but I haven't yet seen phone insensitive or
whatever you call it. What I mean is in Poland "rz" is pronounced the
same (almost the same) as "ż", but "rz" is nowhere near "ż"
when it
comes to sorting. In fact it would be very counter intuitive for me (as
would be 'York'< 'London'). I think it would not be helpful
especially
for foreigners. I've also said that I've _seen_ accent insensitive
dictionaries, but _most_ are case sensitive and so "ą"> "a" not
"ą"="a"
also when it comes to the first letter all dictionaries I know have "Ż"
separate from "Z". You might see our collation as - without accent first
and with accent second. /This is the why we say are ABC. And it would be
intuitive for to have English collation by it's ABC with Y coming just
before Z./