[OT] collating sequences: using glibc

schuler.steffen@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> On May 7, 5:25 pm, pk <p...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> [snip]
>> Is there a way to explicitly print out that information (or, better,
the
>> entire collating sequence in use)? I've been looking for a method to do
>> that for long time, but I have found no complete answer.
> [snip]
> 
> Here the collating sequence of the alphabetical ([:alpha:]) letters
> using
> gawk and sort for the locales C, en_US, and en_US.UTF-8
> (using Fedora Core 7 and the current gawk from CVS):
[snip]

Perhaps the result of the GLIBC functions iswalpha and wprintf together 
with GNU sort explains better the collating of the alphabetic characters 
for the 3 locales C, en_US, en_US.utf8 (my current system: Debian 
GNU/Linux testing (lenny)):

$ cat collate.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	wint_t i;

	if (argc != 2) {
		fprintf(stderr, "usage: ./collate MAX_CHAR_CODE\n");
		exit(1);
	}

	for (i = 1; i <= atoi(argv[1]); ++i)
		if (iswalpha(i))
			wprintf(L"%c\n", i);
	return 0;
}
$ cc -o collate collate.c
$ export LC_ALL=C; ./collate 255 | sort | tr -d '\n'; echo
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
$ export LC_ALL=en_US; ./collate 255 | sort | tr -d '\n'; echo
aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWxXyYzZ
$ # ^^^^^^^...: only Latin letters
$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8; ./collate 65535 | sort | tr -d '\n'; echo
aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWxXyYzZ
$


There seem to be some inconsistencies between gawk and glibc locale 
usage. Especially in the C-code sample only Latin letters are listed for 
LC_ALL=en_US contrary to the similar gawk sample.

Besides, the collating order may be different from the order of the 
character codes --- see:

    http://tinyurl.com/6gdraw

I'm really interested whether there are any further locale bugs in gawk 
(for trying to fix them).
Perhaps I have more time for the research at the current weekend.

--
Steffen