Re: Sorting in Ancient Greek

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Subject: Re: Sorting in Ancient Greek
From: Eliot Kimber <ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 11:00:17 -0500

David Carlisle wrote:

sort order is processor specific, but there is a processor independent
way to achieve

   the behaviour we would like is for the
   various different unaccented and accented alphas to be treated as
   equivalent for sorting purposes.

A general solution to locale-specific sorting in XSL 1.0 is to provide a custom collator implementation. This is often needed because the correct collation sequence for a given body of information in a given language may be determined by any number of variables, including editorial preference, the type of document it is, the information being sorted (part numbers vs index entries vs glossary items).

Saxon 6.5 provides a simple extension mechanism by which you create a simple Java class named com.icl.saxon.sort.Compare_xx where "xx" is the language code for the language you want to sort on. You then use the normal Java rule-based-collator mechanism to define the collation rules for your language. Finally, you use the lang= attribute of xsl:sort to specify your language code, which Saxon will then attempt to match to a collator class, e.g., if your language code is "gr-AN" (a made-up code for ancient Greek), then you would need a collator class named Compare_gr-AN and would specify xsl:sort as:

<xsl:sort lang="gr-AN" ...

Saxon 7 uses a somewhat different approach for integrating custom collators but the basic concepts are the same. Also XSL 2 has more built-in features for specifying custom collators but cannot eliminate the requirement that specific collation rules must be implemented and integrated with your XSLT engine.

As far as I know Saxon is the only XSLT 1 engine that enables the integration of custom collators. If there are others I do not know about them. I don't know about XSLT 2 engines.

Cheers,

Eliot

--
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9030 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78758
(512) 372-8122

eliot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.innodata-isogen.com

Current Thread

Sorting in Ancient Greek
- BODARD Gabriel - Tue, 20 Apr 2004 11:17:51 -0400 (EDT)
  - David Carlisle - Tue, 20 Apr 2004 11:38:36 -0400 (EDT)
    - Eliot Kimber - Mon, 26 Apr 2004 12:02:03 -0400 (EDT) <=
      - Eliot Kimber - Mon, 26 Apr 2004 12:04:11 -0400 (EDT)
  - <Possible follow-ups>
  - Zaneta Au - Tue, 27 Apr 2004 05:02:31 -0400 (EDT)
    - David Carlisle - Tue, 27 Apr 2004 05:10:57 -0400 (EDT)
    - Michael Kay - Tue, 27 Apr 2004 05:48:54 -0400 (EDT)

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Re: Sorting in Ancient Greek, David Carlisle	Thread	Re: Sorting in Ancient Greek, Eliot Kimber
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