Hi,

I am a teacher on a Danish Technical High School, and had a Perl Network Management Course this week. On of the students submitted a question that we solved, but I could not explain it.

My student was sorting words, but sort() got it all wrong. I discovered that he used use locale; which I know can give problems. We solved his problem, but I could not explain what happened.

Environment: ActiveState Perl 5.8.8 build 822 (MSWin32-x86-multi-thread) on Danish XP-pro. The following sample code fails on Windows but not on FreeBSD, Solaris or RedHat. Also tried ActiveState 5.10.0 on XP, which failed as well.

use strict;
use warnings;

my @a = qw(a b c d e f g h i j k l A B C D E F G H I J K L);
my @b = qw(aaa aab aba abb Laa lab);

no locale; print "no locale : ";
print sort(@a),"\n";
use POSIX; print "POSIX     : ";
print sort(@a),"\n";
use locale;print "use locale: ";
print sort(@a),"\n";

no locale; print "no locale : ";
foreach (sort(@b)){printf "%-4s", $_;}
print "\n";
use POSIX; print "POSIX     : ";
foreach (sort(@b)){printf "%-4s", $_;}
print "\n";
use locale;print "use locale: ";
foreach (sort(@b)){printf "%-4s", $_;}

[download]

This code produces the following output on XP: 

no locale : ABCDEFGHIJKLabcdefghijkl
POSIX     : ABCDEFGHIJKLabcdefghijkl
use locale: aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlL
no locale : Laa aaa aab aba abb lab 
POSIX     : Laa aaa aab aba abb lab 
use locale: aba abb lab Laa aaa aab

[download]

Does anybody know why the sort with use locale produces aba abb lab Laa aaa aab.

Best regards

Henrik Thomsen

In reply to use locale; on ActiveState WIN32 by heth

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