On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Henrik Bengtsson wrote: > > > On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> On 05/03/2008 8:56 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote: > >> > Hi, > >> > > >> > just curious, but does anyone know the source/reason of observing the > >> > following error on OSX but not on WinXP and Linux? > >> > >> Presumably in the locale you're using on OSX, "a" < "Z" is false. This > >> is the ascii sort order used in the C locale. On my Windows box, "a" < > >> "Z" is true, because it uses the English_Canada.1252 collation order. > > > > That's it indeed. The person who first reported the error had > > sessionInfo() locale > > 'en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8' and I > > missed that 'C' in the middle, which I guess his system falls back to > > if none of the previous ones exist?!? > > No. Those are settings for various categories, just as you showed for > Window. The first setting appears to be LC_COLLATE, but what they mean is > not documented on the system man page for setlocale. > > It's just that MacOS uses C collation order in English locales, even > though almost everyone else uses aAbB or AaBb (the latter being what the > English actually use, as do almost all book indices in dialects of > English). But then there is no surprise that MacOS has to be different > ... its implementaton of locales is idiosyncratic (to be generous). > > Note that even [A-Za-z] is unsafe -- as I recall Z is in the middle of the > alphabet in Estonian locales. If you want alphabetic characters, use > [[:alpha:]]. If you want ASCII alphabetic characters, write out the > ranges as [AB...Zab...z] > > E.g. (F8 Linux) > > > Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "et_EE.utf8") > [1] "et_EE.utf8" > > paste(sort(c(letters,LETTERS)), collapse="") > [1] "AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsZzTtUuVvWwXxYy"
Alpha and Omega - you said it all. Thanks for the clarifications. /Henrik > > > [...] > > -- > Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > 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 > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel