I'm looking at the original post now, and he's showing only that all the variants on 'e' should be considered equivalent. I don't know where you got the idea that all the variants of 'a' are also equivilant to all the variants of 'e'. He never said that. That would be really bizzarre alphabetization. He is wanting all variants of 'A' to be seen as 'a'. And all of the variants of 'E' to be seen as 'e'. When you convert everything ugly to commas, you don't get alphabetization at all, you get something really odd.

Maybe you're not seeing the characters with the proper encoding on your web browser. Your solution assums that all variants of A, all variants of E, O, U, etc., will all be substituted with commas. That's definately NOT what he's asking for, and probably not what he has in mind.