Question

I’m having issues sorting in Perl having different results in Windows and Unix.

The characters are: a – _ 1 2

In Windows: _ 1 2 - a
In Unix: _ - 1 2 a

I’m guessing the locale has something to do with this – what can I do to make the Unix sort match the Windows sort?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The docs say:

*** WARNING *** The locale specified by the environment affects sort order. Set LC_ALL=C to get the traditional sort order that uses native byte values.

so use

LC_ALL=C sort ...

Example:

$ perl -E'say for @ARGV' a - _ 1 2 | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 sort
_
-
1
2
a

$ perl -E'say for @ARGV' a - _ 1 2 | LC_ALL=C sort
-
1
2
_
a