# Is there a (near) universal standard for sorting titles beginning with contractions? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 18, 2012, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-near-universal-standard-for-sorting-titles-beginning-with-contractions/619105 "2012-04-18T01:01:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![gazpacho](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6f9a4e/32.png) [@gazpacho](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gazpacho)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2012, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-near-universal-standard-for-sorting-titles-beginning-with-contractions/619105/21 "2012-04-18T20:00:42Z")
> [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > Macs are Personal Computers, and use ASCII. The tags for music can be unicode. Itunes has supported this since about version 2. Most other players like winamp and windows media player also support unicode tags. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2012, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-near-universal-standard-for-sorting-titles-beginning-with-contractions/619105/22 "2012-04-18T20:09:26Z")
Even so, I don’t think most commercial software really uses STRICT ASCII/Unicode ordering, in other words, the programmer isn’t likely to just use if strcmp(a,b) \< 0 then if strcmp(a,b) = 0 then if strcmp(a,b) \> 0 then They’ll likely implement their own comparator. One likely change is to ignore case, otherwise all of your titles starting with a capital letter will come before all titles with lowercase. Hell, even in iTunes you can see they clearly use a custom comparitor because it ignores parts of strings (like leading spaces and words like The). When you’ve implemented a custom comparator. ASCII/Unicode ordering isn’t wholly irrelevant, for “special” characters like apostrophes they can be used as a tiebreaker, but the chances of serious commercial software just using what amounts to strcmp (and thus organizing everything in STRICT character code ordering) are pretty small. ---
**Author:** ![Floater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dc4da7/32.png) [@Floater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Floater)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2012, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-near-universal-standard-for-sorting-titles-beginning-with-contractions/619105/23 "2012-04-19T13:19:23Z")
> [@Lasciel](#): > > ETA - as for alphabetizing, I bet it started the way a lot of styles started. Some strong-willed and opinionated person started doing it one way, bullied everyone else into going along, and then trained new people in that method so that it started to get passed down. I don’t think that alphabetizing systems are entirely standardized between libraries, however, so that doesn’t necessarily matter. Our library uses the word-to-word method and ignores apostrophes. I’d say that so it is. I got into it when I went from cataloguer to programmer in charge of editing various sorts of catalogue outputs and inherited a system from my predecessor. One thing that makes it impossible to implement a universal standard is that different languages use different order between the same characters and a letter that is a character in its own right in one language is not in another. Take, for instance, **a** , **á** , **à** , **ã** , **å** and **ä**. Should they all be treated as **a**? In Swedish the answer is no, as **a** , **å** and **ä** are different letters. And _if_ you should put the others in a certain order, which order would that be? The we come to digits. Should they go before or after letters? Should they be sorted as separate characters or should they be sorted according to their number values: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 .. 20, 21 etc? Mac, Mc, M’ has already been discussed. We all treat them as **mac**. On top of that we have many names ending with -son, or, in most cases, -sson. They are all uniformed to -sson. Should space be treated as a word separator or not? Some sorting standards do, some don’t. We do and treat “-” as space as well. All other non letter or digit characters are omitted. ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_K](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5ac83/32.png) [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2012, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-near-universal-standard-for-sorting-titles-beginning-with-contractions/619105/24 "2012-04-19T16:14:08Z")
> [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > For most sorting that is done now, Manuals of style don’t matter – computer collating codes are what matters. > > These are the codes that determine which characters sort in what order. Since most sorting is done just by computers, the order of these codes determines it for most sorting. > > In both ASCII (PC’s & Internet) and EBCDIC (mainframes), space comes before apostrophe which comes before letters or digits. So both of them would sort to your first list. (There are lots of methods in computer programming to allow other collating sequences, or to skip non-alphameric characters, etc. But most sorting uses the default sorting sequence.) Also upper case comes before lower case. Finder and Windows Explorer are programmed to ignore case, but when listing files in **bash** , Aardvark will come before Zebra, but Zebra will come before aardvark. ---
**Author:** ![Darth\_Panda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ee7513/32.png) [@Darth\_Panda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darth_Panda)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2012, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-near-universal-standard-for-sorting-titles-beginning-with-contractions/619105/25 "2012-04-19T17:23:53Z")
> [@Floater](#): > > I once sat on a committee to work out a national standard for sorting, but it turned out in the end that we all had different needs (libraries, telephone directories and what have you) and that the task was impossible (and unnecessary). Did you at least change the color of the cover of the manual? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-near-universal-standard-for-sorting-titles-beginning-with-contractions/619105.md?page=1)