Hi,
For an update of the maps package, I have run into a bug caused by the
locale-depent behaviour of order().
In a certain function, the polygon names of the world map are lexically sorted
with order() prior to being sent to a C routine. That routine expects them to
be sorted according to ASCII rules, but that is not the result I get. The main
culprit is the colon used to identify sub-regions. For instance, in my locale
(en_GB_UTF-8), I get
"uk:northen ireland" < "ukrain" < "uk:scotland"
which is not the order expected by C. I guess some language settings would also
cause other unexpected results.
Apart from the pain of fixing uk/ukrain ambiguities, is there a safe way to fix
this order() in a package? An obvious solution seems to be
lcc <- Sys.getlocale("LC_COLLATE")
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE","C")
ord.nam <- order(nam)
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE",lcc)
This seems to work fine on my linux PC, but I am not sure about other platforms
(Windows, OS-X...), though the "C" locale should be standard. Is this safe? Or
is there a better way to get the right ordering?
Alex
---
Dr. Alex Deckmyn e-mail: [email protected]
Royal Meteorological Institute http://www.meteo.be
Ringlaan 3, 1180 Ukkel, Belgium tel. (32)(2)3730646
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