Hybrid approach to collating unicode text strings consisting primarily of ASCII characters

摘要

Collating text strings having Unicode encoding includes receiving two text strings S=s₁s₂ . . . s and T=t₁t₂ . . . t_m. When the two text strings are not identical, there is a smallest positive integer p for which the two text strings differ. The process looks up the characters s_p and t_p in a predefined lookup table. If either of these characters is missing from the lookup table, the collation of the text strings is determined using the standard Unicode comparison of the text strings s_ps_p+1 . . . s_n and t_pt_p+1 . . . t_m. Otherwise, the lookup table assigns weights v_p and w_p for the characters s_p and t_p. When v_p≠w_p, these weights define the collation order of the strings S and T. When v_p=w_p, the collation of S and T is determined recursively using the suffix strings s_p+1 . . . s_n and t_p+1 . . . t_m.