Hybrid comparison for unicode text strings consisting primarily of ASCII characters

摘要

A method compares text strings having Unicode encoding. The method receives a first string S=s1s2 . . . sn and a second string T=t1t2 . . . tm, where s1, s2, . . . , sn and t1, t2, . . . , tm are Unicode characters. The method computes a first string weight for the first string S according to a weight function ƒ. When S consists of ASCII characters, ƒ(S)=S. when S includes one or more non-replaceable non-ASCII characters, the first string weight ƒ(S) is a concatenation of an ASCII weight prefix ƒA(S) and a Unicode weight suffix ƒU(S). The method also computes a second string weight for the second text string T. Equality of the strings is tested using the string weights.