Collating Sequence

[baffled_in_UK]

Hi,

I program in RPG for a living and in this code we have a collating sequence to determine higher/lower values, the sequence is

blank
special characters
lower case letters
upper case letters
numbers

this means that

@ is < A
9 is > k
A is > a

etc.

Does PHP follow a similar set of rules ?

Thanks
JG

[bernouli]

and why is g > k ?

[baffled_in_UK]

sorry, possibly a bad choice , it isn't a lower case "g" that is a NINE

[merkinmuffley]

PHP's rules appear to be a little different...

echo ("9" < "@");
echo ("@" < "A");
echo ("Z" < "a");

Output:

111

so, it appears that numbers are less than special characters like @, which are less than upper case letters which are less than lower-case letters. which is sort of strange since then "Apple" is less than "apple"...

[baffled_in_UK]

going to take me a bit of getting used to.

Thanks for the answer.
JG

[Weedpacket]

PHP's rules appear to be a little different...

Yes, in PHP strings are ordered lexicographically according to their ASCII encoding.

 !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

If you're sorting on something other than this, you could write a comparison function to compare two strings to see if they're < or > according to your rules. Then you can use it in a usort() call.