Welcome, guest | Sign In | My Account | Store | Cart

Using sorting order of your country/culture when sorting (collate,locale) (Python recipe) by Eino Mäkitalo
ActiveState Code (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/442492/)

It takes me over half an hour to learn how it works. (I hope to save your time)

You have to remember to add compare function to your sort/sorted command.

Python, 27 lines
Download
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
# -*- coding:iso8859-1 -*-
import locale

# using your default locale (user settings)
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"")
#locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"fi") or something else

stuff="aåbäcÖöAÄÅBCabcÅÄÖabcÅÄÖ"

# using sorted-function
print "Wrong order:"
print "".join(sorted(stuff))  # not using locale

print "Right order:"
print "".join(sorted(stuff,cmp=locale.strcoll)) # using locale


# in place sorting
stufflist=list(stuff)

print "Wrong order:"
stufflist.sort()  # not using locale
print "".join(stufflist)  

print "Right order:"
stufflist.sort(cmp=locale.strcoll) # using locale
print "".join(stufflist)

This is quite simple recipe following exactly python's locale manual. See: http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-locale.html

2 comments

Raymond Hettinger 18 years, 5 months ago  # | flag

Faster to use key=locale.strxfrm than cmp=locale.strcoll.

print "Right order:"
stufflist.sort(key=locale.strxfrm) # using locale
print "".join(stufflist)
Chris Arndt 18 years, 5 months ago  # | flag

Compability. Beware:

  • The built-in function 'sorted()' is only available from Python 2.4.

  • Support for the keyword argument 'key' to the 'sort()' method of lists was only added in Python 2.4 as well.

Created by Eino Mäkitalo on Sat, 29 Oct 2005 (PSF)
◄ Python recipes (4591) ►
◄ Eino Mäkitalo's recipes (1) ►

Required Modules

  • (none specified)

Other Information and Tasks