Question

I want to sort an array I have so that the Umlauts are treated as normal versions of the characters (ä == a, etc.). I thought localizedCaseInsensitiveCompare: should do the trick. But it doesn’t. Anyone?

Best
–f

Answer 1

localizedCaseInsensitiveCompare: compares using the standard rules in the current language chosen by the user, ignoring the case. In your case you want to disregard the diacritics, not the case. This means you need to do something else.

You need to use compare:options: and pass NSDiacriticInsensitiveSearch as an option. see here.

To sort an array using it, you need to either use a block using sortedArrayUsingComparator:, or implement a category method in NSString and pass that selector to sortedArrayUsingSelector:. Don’t forget to prefix the name of the category method so that it doesn’t overlap with a private method in the framework. So, do something like

@interface NSString (myaddition)
-(NSComparisonResult)mySecretDiacriticsInsensitveCompare:(NSString*)string;
@end