Incorrect sorting of the Scandinavian alphabets Options

[Christian J]

Not only PHP sorts the Swedish letters å, ä and ö incorrectly, now I noticed that javascript does the same, and also in Danish and Norwegian. The arrays below should be in the correct order for each language:

CODE

window.onload=function()
{    
    var se=['å','ä','ö']; // Swedish
    var dk=['æ','ø','å']; // Danish, apparently same as Norwegian
    
    alert(se.sort());
    alert(dk.sort());    
}

Note that Danish and Norwegian use a different order than Swedish. But in the sorted javascript alerts the Swedish letters are incorrectly sorted as "ä,å,ö", while Danish and Norwegian are (again incorrectly) sorted as "å,æ,ø". The same error appear in IE, Opera and Firefox. At least Opera's Norwegian creators should know their own alphabet, so am I correct in assuming that all three browser vendors deliberately follow some flawed convention?

[Liam Quinn]

The default sort algorithm in JavaScript is based purely on the Unicode code point. If you want a locale-sensitive sort order, you can use this:

CODE

function localeSort(string1, string2) {
  return string1.toString().localeCompare(string2.toString());
}

var se=['å','ä','ö']; // Swedish
var dk=['æ','ø','å']; // Danish, apparently same as Norwegian

alert(se.sort(localeSort));
alert(dk.sort(localeSort));

That should use the locale configured on the user's system. If you want to use a specific locale regardless of the user's locale, I think you're stuck with writing the code for the locale-specific rules yourself in the function you pass to sort().