Question

In Rails 3 how do I sort an array of strings with special characters.

I have:

[Água, Electricidade, Telefone, Internet, Televisão, Gás, Renda]

However when i invoke sort over the array Água gets sent to the end of the array.

Answer 1

The approach I used when I ran into the same issue (depends on iconv gem):

require 'iconv'

def sort_alphabetical(words)
  # caching and api-wrapper
  transliterations = {}

  transliterate = lambda do |w|
    transliterations[w] ||= Iconv.iconv('ascii//ignore//translit', 'utf-8', w).to_s
  end

  words.sort do |w1,w2|
    transliterate.call(w1) <=> transliterate.call(w2)
  end
end

sorted = sort_alphabetical(...)

An alternative would be to use the sort_alphabetical gem.