I have a program that takes input from a utf-8 text file which contains text in 10 languages. The data is treated variously, but the bit posing a problem is a "simple" alphabetical sort, language by language. English works fine, no surprise. However, in French the É is placed after Z whereas it should be after E; and I won't even go into what it does with Greek ;)

Here's a snippet: 

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;
use utf8;
use open ':utf8'; 
use FileHandle;

# lots of treatment in between .... then

foreach $term_name (sort keys %term) {
    if ( defined $term{$term_name}{$LL}{term} )     {
        $text = $term{$term_name}{$LL}{term};
        $char_1 = uc(substr($text,0,1));
        push @char, $char_1;     
    }
}

remove_duplicates(@char);

@char = sort(@char);

[download]
where $LL is the language code, and term is the term in that language. The subroutine remove_duplicates() just gets rid of excess letters so that @char contains only unique letters.

I'm using Perl ActiveState 5.8.0 on Windows NT4. I've read the docs on unicode and utf-8; unfortunately they all seem to imply that sort() works as is.

I'm looking either to sort in true alphabet fashion where É follows E, or to combining anything commencing with an accented character into the non-accented character. Any tips would be appreciated.

Thank you

In reply to Sorting utf-8 by webelan

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