jeffreys at rand.org
2009-Dec-21 19:40 UTC
[Rd] sort yields different results on OS X (PR#14163)
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"
Prof Brian Ripley
2009-Dec-22 12:18 UTC
[Rd] sort yields different results on OS X (PR#14163)
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?
On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, jeffreys at 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 at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
--
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)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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