Clarify SortingHOWTO regarding locale aware string sorting

[CendioOssman]

BPO	47259
Nosy	@rhettinger, @stevendaprano, @CendioOssman

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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assignee = 'https://github.com/rhettinger'
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2022-04-08.10:31:59.766>
labels = ['3.11', '3.10', 'docs']
title = 'Clarify SortingHOWTO regarding locale aware string sorting'
updated_at = <Date 2022-04-08.17:49:04.631>
user = 'https://github.com/CendioOssman'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2022-04-08.17:49:04.631>
actor = 'rhettinger'
assignee = 'rhettinger'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Documentation']
creation = <Date 2022-04-08.10:31:59.766>
creator = 'CendioOssman'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 47259
keywords = []
message_count = 2.0
messages = ['416972', '416997']
nosy_count = 3.0
nosy_names = ['rhettinger', 'steven.daprano', 'CendioOssman']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = None
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = None
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue47259'
versions = ['Python 3.10', 'Python 3.11']

[CendioOssman]

There is a big gotcha in Python that is easily overlooked and should at the very least be more prominently pointed out in the documentation.

Sorting strings will produce results that is very confusing for humans.

I happens to work for ASCII, but will generally produce bad results for other things as code points do not always follow the alphabetical order.

The expressions chapter¹ mentions this fact, but you have to dig quite a bit to reach that. It also mentions that normalization is an issue, but it never mentions the issue about code point order versus alphabetical order.

The sorting tutorial mentions under "Odds and ends"² that you need to use a special key or comparison function to get locale aware sorting. It doesn't mention that this also includes respecting alphabetical order, which might be overlooked unless you are very familiar with how the sorting works. The tutorial is also something you have to dig a bit to reach.

Ideally string comparison would always be locale aware in a high level language such as Python. However, a smaller step would be a note on sorted()³ that extra care needs to be taken for strings as the default behaviour will produce unexpected results once your strings include anything outside the English alphabet.

¹ https://docs.python.org/3/reference/expressions.html
² https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html#odd-and-ends
³ https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#sorted

[rhettinger]

I don't think splashing this everywhere else in the docs would be helpful. Tools like list.sort, sorted, min, max, nlargest, nsmallest use whatever sort order is provided by the underlying object whether it be a string, tuple, float, or int.

The section on expressions is the intended place to cover how comparison are defined for core objects: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/expressions.html#value-comparisons

As suggested, I will edit the sorting howto to be cleared that locale aware sort ordering refers to alphabetical orderings which can vary (for example, the Spanish ll sorts differently in different locales).