Re: How to compare strings?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com>:

| Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
|> But I think there are completely different problems too. Does not some 
|> languages sort partly depending the phonetics instead of the spelling?
|
| TBH i have no idea what you mean by that... could you give an example?

It's true, at least in Norwegian phone books.  Before the letter Å
entered our alphabet, Aa was used instead.  You don't find that in
regular words, anymore, but the practice survives in many family
names.  So a name like Aarnes would be alphabetized like it were
Årnes.  And just to make matters really confusing, the rule is
supposed not to be followed with foreign names where the aa really
does not corresponding to the letter å, so an algorithmic solution is
impossible.  (I strongly suspect that Norwegian phone books
consistently alphabetize aa as å, though, regardless of the origin of
the name.)

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell