Unusual Sort Order/Case Sensitivity in Swedish Locale

One of the Newton 2.x OS Q&As
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This document was exported on 7/23/97.

Unusual Sort Order/Case Sensitivity in Swedish Locale (1/16/97)

Q: When I set the unit to the Swedish locale and use the StrPos global function to search for a ':' character, it finds other characters such as '.' or ';'. Isn't that a bug? How can I reliably search for these characters in any locale?

A: The global function StrPos and many of the other string functions are case insensitive - they treat upper and lowercase letters as being identical. In other languages, characters such as accented letters may be considered as different cases of the base letter, so they are treated as identical as well. In the Newton OS model, the concepts 'same case' and 'same position in the sorting order' are not distinguished, so all cases of a letter will sort to the same position. Going backwards, all characters that sort identically are considered to be different cases of the same letter. Well, in the Swedish sort order, many punctuation characters are defined to sort to the same place, and so the case insensitive functions in the Newton device treat the characters as identical. Many special and punctuation characters are grouped this way, but perhaps the most surprising set is ? Á : , . ; À and !, which all sort to the same position and so are treated as identical in Swedish by StrPos and other case insensitive functions.

To search a string for a particular character using a case sensitive search, use the CharPos function instead of StrPos.