[R] sort() depends on locale (and platform and build)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 15/06/2014 07:45, Pascal Oettli wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Please provide your sessionInfo(). I don't see this issue with R 3.1.0
> Patched on Linux.

Nor on any of my platforms.

We would also need to know if ICU was found when R was installed: see 
?Comparison .

>
> Regards,
> Pascal
>
> On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 2:15 PM, Marius Hofert
> <marius.hofert at math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> If I use invisible(Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C")) in ~/.Rprofile, then
>>
>>> sort(c("L.Y", "Lu", "L.Q"))
>> [1] "L.Q" "L.Y" "Lu"
>>
>> whereas using invisible(Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "en_US.UTF-8")) results in
>>
>>> sort(c("L.Y", "Lu", "L.Q"))
>> [1] "L.Q" "Lu"  "L.Y"
>>
>> I know this issue has appeared already
>> (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help//2012-February/304089.html), I
>> just don't see a reason for the second output: either '.' comes before
>> letters, then the result should be
>> "L.Q" "L.Y" "Lu" or it comes afterwards, then it should be "Lu" "L.Q"
>> "L.Y" -- the above result thus seems inconsistent to any useful notion
>> of 'sort' (?)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Marius
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>
>


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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