Question

Given for example the class of “visible characters”

[:graph:]

AKA

[\x21-\x7E]

How could I go about printing those in “collation” order, that is the order determined by LC_COLLATE

Answer 1

Just run it through sort. The hardest part is getting a list of characters. This works for ASCII:

for ((i=0x21; i<=0x7E; i++))
do 
    printf "\\$(printf '%03o' $i)\0"; 
done | sort -z | tr -d '\0'

It writes out each character followed by a NUL byte, then sorts them all (sort considers LC_COLLATE), and finally deletes the NULs.