in reply to Re^3: Mixed Unicode and ANSI string comparisons?
in thread Mixed Unicode and ANSI string comparisons?
As Ricardo Signes said: Right now, you can write programs in Perl that handle all this correctly, using only one tool: extreme vigilance.
That's the source of my depression!
The "situation" I referred to is the desire of a customer to sort two sets of data together: 1 legacy set stored in ascii/ANSI/ISO-8859-x; and another newer set stored in Unicode. The problem is that the legacy set makes use of the extended ascii character set (8-bit chars) which don't convert to Unicode (easily).
My take when asked about it was: don't! Keep two lists for lookup and don't mix them, because they cannot logically be sorted together. They countered by sorting two small subsets together (using Java) and saying that it was easier for their people to do lookups in a single list.
It was at that point I asked my question here. My expectation was that sort would either throw an error; or sort them into two distinct groups, but I didn't know. (Or know how to check without doing a shitload of reading and trial and error.)
The result of this thread is so depressing that I'm going to turn the work down and let them find someone else. (Shame. Could have been a nice in.)