[R] sort charcters in W2K and NT

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You can set any locale you like, and I suspect your machines are in 
different locales (I believe older versions of Windows, including NT4, had 
limited support for locales).

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Ivar Herfindal wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 11:58:49 +0200, Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.uni- 
> dortmund.de> wrote:
> 
> > Ivar Herfindal wrote:
> >
> >> Hello.
> >>
> >> I have a problem using sort() in windows 2000 and windows NT 4.0, 
> >> running R 1.8.0 on both. I want to sort a vector of characters names, 
> >> where I have used "Scandinavian" letters, like 'Æ', 'Ø', and 'Å' (for 
> >> those who cannot display these letters this question seems rather 
> >> meaningless, i guess). Windows 2000 sorts the vector like I am used to 
> >> from other software, with 'Å' as the last letter in the alphabet, while 
> >> windows NT has "Å" just after "A", and "Ø" following "O".
> >>
> >> Is there a way to solve this problem (other than replace the 
> >> Scandinavian letters)?
> >>
> >> A short example:
> >> sort(c('a','p','å'))
> >> # on windows 2000:
> >> [1] "a" "p" "å"
> >>
> >> # on windows NT
> >> [1] "a" "å" "p"
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance
> >
> > ?sort tells us:
> >
> > "The sort order for character vectors will depend on the collating 
> > sequence of the locale in use: see Comparison."
> >
> > and ?Comparison points you to ?locales which gives an example:
> >
> > Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C")  # turn off locale-specific sorting
> >
> > Uwe Ligges
> >
> 
> Thanks for the help, it worked great. However, it appers that using the 
> Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C") makes R sort the vector in a new way, 
> different from the two mentioned above. But since R sorts character vectors 
> at same manner on both W2K and Window NT, after writing 
> Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C"), it is sufficient for me.
> 
> Ivar Herfindal
> 
> >
> >> Ivar Herfindal
> >>
> >> On windows 2000:
> >>
> >>> version
> >>
> >> _              platform i386-pc-mingw32
> >> arch     i386           os       mingw32        system   i386, mingw32  
> >> status                  major    1              minor    8.0            
> >> year     2003           month    10             day      08             
> >> language R
> >>
> >>>
> >>
> >> On windows NT:
> >>
> >>> version
> >>
> >> _              platform i386-pc-mingw32
> >> arch     i386           os       mingw32        system   i386, mingw32  
> >> status                  major    1              minor    8.0            
> >> year     2003           month    10             day      08             
> >> language R
> >>
> >>>
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
> >> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> >> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> >
> >
> >
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> 
> 

-- 
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