Hi, Thanks for your reply. I thought using locales might work, although I have never used them before. But when I ran

use locale;
    print +(sort grep /\w/, map { chr() } 0..255), "\n";
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to find out exactly what kind of ordering I would get, my was it weird. These are just the first few characters:

_01╣2▓3│456789aAß┴Ó└Ô┬õ─Ò├Õ┼µãbBcCþÃdD­ðeE

Nonetheless, I tried the sort with

#use locale;      
@char = sort(@char);
#no locale;
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and I got the ordering

A É B C D E

for the French. Not quite what I expected. Now I'm going to take a look at "unicode::collate" as mentioned by another post.

Thanks for your help though. It is definitely a steep learning curve.
Anne