As Ricardo Signes said: Right now, you can write programs in Perl that handle all this correctly, using only one tool: extreme vigilance.

That's the source of my depression!

The "situation" I referred to is the desire of a customer to sort two sets of data together: 1 legacy set stored in ascii/ANSI/ISO-8859-x; and another newer set stored in Unicode. The problem is that the legacy set makes use of the extended ascii character set (8-bit chars) which don't convert to Unicode (easily).

My take when asked about it was: don't! Keep two lists for lookup and don't mix them, because they cannot logically be sorted together. They countered by sorting two small subsets together (using Java) and saying that it was easier for their people to do lookups in a single list.

It was at that point I asked my question here. My expectation was that sort would either throw an error; or sort them into two distinct groups, but I didn't know. (Or know how to check without doing a shitload of reading and trial and error.)

The result of this thread is so depressing that I'm going to turn the work down and let them find someone else. (Shame. Could have been a nice in.)

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". I knew I was on the right track :)
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

In reply to Re^4: Mixed Unicode and ANSI string comparisons? by BrowserUk
in thread Mixed Unicode and ANSI string comparisons? by BrowserUk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.