Re: UTF-8, OSTA-UDF [why?], Unicode, and miscellaneous gibberi=

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
27 Aug 1997 06:21:00 GMT

Followup to: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970826221538.16339A-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
By author: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> ...but since sorting is charset-dependent, I can always apply charset's
> local definition of sorting and case-mapping (or even phonetic matching
> in loose search, or language-dependent word-searching rules in keywords
> searching) if I know the charset. One can even write C++ class to
> handle such things automatically and derive charsets from it (or do it
> in any OO language but Java, or in plain C if one wishes). With bare
> Unicode I simply can't do that unless I convert things back.
>

B*llsh*t. Sorting is not charset dependent, is is *LANGUAGE*
dependent. It is not the same thing.

The Swedish word "smörgåsbord" is borrowed into English. Therefore,
you cannot tell from looking at it, or its encoding, whether or not it
is in English or Swedish. However, in Swedish "ö" sorts after "z",
"å" and "ä", but in English it sorts between "n" and "p".

Furthermore, in Swedish, "ü" sorts like "y", between "x" and "z", but
in German it sorts after "z", "ä" and "ö". In Swedish "w" sorts like
"v", between "u" and "x", but in English separetly between "v" and
"x".

Until recently, in Spanish, the *two* letters "ch" sorted like a
separate letter between "c" and "d".

You *can't* do this in any existing multilingual charset, be it Latin,
Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Han, or IPA.

-hpa

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