Re: [xsl] Is this a sorting bug in xalan 6.4.0?

[Stan Dyck <sgd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 09:51  PM, Roger Glover wrote:
> I am sure there are lots of people here who can trump my experience 
> handily,
> but is my expectation that spaces will be significant in string 
> sorting, at
> least by default, really *that* parochial?

This was my thinking as well. There's more though. It appears that in 
addition to the space character, xalan also ignores "-" as well. I 
found a bug report on the xalan bugzilla database:

http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13830

Xalan uses the java.text.Collator object (the compare method) to 
compare strings, probably because it does locale-sensitive string 
comparisons. So if there is anyone to blame in this case, it is Sun. 
The xalan developers don't appear to consider it a bug.

Interestingly, the String object's compareTo method sorts strings with 
spaces and minus signs as I would expect because it does a 
lexicographic comparison. Presumably, String.compareTo is not 
necessarily locale-specific, otherwise, why provide a separate object 
like Collator just for comparing strings. I'm curious at how Saxon does 
string comparisons for the purpose of implementing xsl:sort.

StanD.


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