On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 09:51 PM, Roger Glover wrote:
I am sure there are lots of people here who can trump my experience
handily,
but is my expectation that spaces will be significant in string
sorting, at
least by default, really *that* parochial?
This was my thinking as well. There's more though. It appears that in
addition to the space character, xalan also ignores "-" as well. I
found a bug report on the xalan bugzilla database:
http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13830
Xalan uses the java.text.Collator object (the compare method) to
compare strings, probably because it does locale-sensitive string
comparisons. So if there is anyone to blame in this case, it is Sun.
The xalan developers don't appear to consider it a bug.
Interestingly, the String object's compareTo method sorts strings with
spaces and minus signs as I would expect because it does a
lexicographic comparison. Presumably, String.compareTo is not
necessarily locale-specific, otherwise, why provide a separate object
like Collator just for comparing strings. I'm curious at how Saxon does
string comparisons for the purpose of implementing xsl:sort.
StanD.
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