Re: Internationalized string sorting

As a followup, it appears that IBM's International Components
for Unicode (ICU, http://icu.sourceforge.net/) is capable of handling
most of these issues.  It's not in PHP (C, C++, or Java) but it can
generate strcmp()-compatible sort keys that can be tossed into the
database alongside the language-specific strings, so an
ORDER BY clause can reference the sort-key column and get the
desired results.

IIRC there is also a preliminary ICU -> PHP binding extension that
can be used as well, but I don't know that it supports every ICU
feature available.

-Bob

> Specifically, I have two strings, both UTF-8 encoded, and should have
> at least the ISO-3166 country code and possibly the ISO-639 language
> code.  How do I determine the lexicographical order of these two 
> strings?
>
> From what I can tell strcoll() doesn't work for this purpose as it 
> assumes
> a character encoding based on the locale string passed to setlocale().
> The multibyte extension (mbstring) doesn't include any string sorting/
> ordering functions, either.