Sorting and spaces.

Thu May 31 12:53:58 EDT 2018

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']