From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Dec 22 13:18:46 2009
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:18:46 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Rd] sort yields different results on OS X (PR#14163)
In-Reply-To: <20091221194009.4E4882830319@mail.pubhealth.ku.dk>
References: <20091221194009.4E4882830319@mail.pubhealth.ku.dk>
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0912221212120.15604@toucan.stats.ox.ac.uk>

As the help says

      The sort order for character vectors will depend on the collating
      sequence of the locale in use: see ?Comparison?.

and that ref says

      Collation of
      non-letters (spaces, punctuation signs, hyphens, fractions and so
      on) is even more problematic.

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).

Why did you report a documented difference as a bug?

On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, jeffreys at rand.org wrote:

> Full_Name: Jeffrey Sullivan
> Version: 2.10
> OS: Mac
> Submission from: (NULL) (130.154.0.250)
>
>
> Sort produces different results when sorting strings with non-alphanumeric
> characters, depending on the operating system:
>
> RHEL 5.2, R 2.10.0
> -------------
>> v <- c("1","<0",">3","2")
>> Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE","en_US.UTF-8")
> [1] "en_US.UTF-8"
>> sort(v)
> [1] "<0" "1"  "2"  ">3"
>
> Max OS 10.5.8, R 2.10.1
> -------------------
>> v <- c("1","<0",">3","2")
>> Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE","en_US.UTF-8")
> [1] "en_US.UTF-8"
>> sort(v)
> [1] "<0" ">3" "1"  "2"
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


[Rd] sort yields different results on OS X (PR#14163)
Prof Brian Ripley