From p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk  Tue Dec 22 13:59:54 2009
From: p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk (Peter Dalgaard)
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:59:54 +0100
Subject: [Rd] sort yields different results on OS X (PR#14163)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0912221212120.15604@toucan.stats.ox.ac.uk>
References: <20091221194009.4E4882830319@mail.pubhealth.ku.dk>
	<alpine.LFD.2.00.0912221212120.15604@toucan.stats.ox.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <4B30C2CA.8010009@biostat.ku.dk>

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> 
> That different OSes use the same name for a locale does not make them 
> the same locale.
> 
> Note that R can be compiled to use ICU, which provides a well-considered 
> collation suite.  R on Mac OS X uses ICU, as does a Linux build if it is 
> available -- so I would say that it is RHEL that is out of line here (it 
> makes little sense to have < and > far apart in the collation sequence).
> 

That's not it:

 > v <- c("1","<0","<3","2")
 > sort(v)
[1] "<0" "1"  "2"  "<3"

The point is rather that "special characters" are ignored during collation.

Apparently, this comes from /usr/share/i18n/locales/iso14651_t1_common 
on Fedora; I wouldn't know how faithful to the ISO standard that is.

-- 
    O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             ?ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
   c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
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[Rd] sort yields different results on OS X (PR#14163)
Peter Dalgaard