On Dec 22, 2009, at 4:18 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
As the help says
The sort order for character vectors will depend on the collating
sequence of the locale in use: see ‘Comparison’.
and that ref says
Collation of
non-letters (spaces, punctuation signs, hyphens, fractions and so
on) is even more problematic.
That different OSes use the same name for a locale does not make
them the same locale.
Note that R can be compiled to use ICU, which provides a well-
considered collation suite. R on Mac OS X uses ICU, as does a Linux
build if it is available -- so I would say that it is RHEL that is
out of line here (it makes little sense to have < and > far apart in
the collation sequence).
Why did you report a documented difference as a bug?
Because it wasn't clear to me from the documentation what sort of
"problematic" behaviors were covered as documented differences vs
unexpected behavior. Other OSS projects I have been involved with have
a "when in doubt, file a bug" policy. If that isn't the case with R, I
won't do so in the future.
Thank you for the pointer towards ICU. RHEL has some of the ICU
libraries, but the icuSetCollate function returns a warning that R was
not built with them. Including a reference to this function in the
"See Also" for Comparison would make this info a little easier to find.
Thanks for your time,
Jeff
On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, jeffr...@rand.org wrote:
Full_Name: Jeffrey Sullivan
Version: 2.10
OS: Mac
Submission from: (NULL) (130.154.0.250)
Sort produces different results when sorting strings with non-
alphanumeric
characters, depending on the operating system:
RHEL 5.2, R 2.10.0
-------------
v <- c("1","<0",">3","2")
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE","en_US.UTF-8")
[1] "en_US.UTF-8"
sort(v)
[1] "<0" "1" "2" ">3"
Max OS 10.5.8, R 2.10.1
-------------------
v <- c("1","<0",">3","2")
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE","en_US.UTF-8")
[1] "en_US.UTF-8"
sort(v)
[1] "<0" ">3" "1" "2"
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
--
Jeffrey Sullivan
Senior Project Associate
RAND Corporation
Work : (310) 393-0411 x6883
Fax : (310) 260-8147
SIPR : jeffr...@sm.rand.pentagon.smil.mil
JWICS: sulliv...@la.ic.gov
__________________________________________________________________________
This email message is for the sole use of the intended r...{{dropped:8}}
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
