[R-SIG-Mac] a question of alphabetical order [follow-up]

[[Ricardo Rodriguez] Your XEN ICT Team]

Hi,

This issue comes from a thread of the same title, "a question of 
alphabetical order", initiated yesterday in r-help at r-project.org list. 
As it affects  now only Mac environment, I follow Brian Ripley's advice 
and move it to this list.

It is now clear that ordering lists/variable values is a kind of 
nightmare whatever platform we use. As I (and possible many others!) 
need to get a right order, or an "as right as possible" order, for list 
of strings using non-ASCII character, namely áéíóú, ÁÉÍÓÚ and ñ,Ñ, we 
have been considering a number of options.

Hans-Joerg Bibiko proposed a customized function to do the trick. Brian 
Ripley spoke about es_ES.ISO8859-15 doing almost the right thing for 
these characters.

Here what I get working in a MacBook which environment I describe at the 
bottom of the message:

http://mire.environmentalchange.net/~webmaster/images/toPlot.png

Here the code:

png(file="toPlot.png", pointsize = 14, width = 1000, height = 480, units 
= "px", bg="#eaedd5")
Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "es_ES.ISO8859-15")
toPlot <- data.frame(medio=c("avión", "barco", "bicicleta", "ángulo", 
"choco", "camión", "coche", "tren", "aleta", "luna", "llave"), 
variable=c(34, 33, 3, 37, 54, 23, 67, 30, 23, 56, 13))
toPlot<-toPlot[order(toPlot$medio),]
Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "en_GB.UTF-8")
barplot(toPlot$variable,names.arg=toPlot$medio)
dev.off()

As you see in the order of labels, accent is not ignored, and ch and ll 
are considered as single instances. These are not longer the case with 
Spanish alphabetical order. It changed in 1994.

So, Hans's solution seems the only one available to the correct order. 
At least working with in the environment described below.

In any case, please,

1. Are you aware of any new locale we could try to see if it is already 
updated?
2. If it doesn't exist, how/where must we go to propose/start creating 
such e locale?

Here the environment:

 > version
               _                                      
platform       i386-apple-darwin9.2.2                 
arch           i386                                   
os             darwin9.2.2                            
system         i386, darwin9.2.2                      
status         beta                                   
major          2                                      
minor          7.0                                    
year           2008                                   
month          04                                     
day            12                                     
svn rev        45280                                  
language       R                                      
version.string R version 2.7.0 beta (2008-04-12 r45280)
 > sessionInfo()
R version 2.7.0 beta (2008-04-12 r45280)
i386-apple-darwin9.2.2

locale:
en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base    
 >

R GUI 1.24-devel (5072)

Thank you so much for your help,

Ricardo

-- 
Ricardo Rodríguez
Your XEN ICT Team