Sort dictionary by key using locale/collation

Question

The following code is ignoring the locale and Égypt goes at the end, what\'s wrong?

dict = {\"United States\": \"United States\", \"Spain\" : \"Spain\", \"Englan         


        

Answer 1

Here's a work-around.

Use unicode's normalization form canonical decomposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_forms

# utf-8 <-> unicode is left as exercise to the reader
egypt = unicodedata.normalize("NFD", egypt)

sorted(['Egypt', 'E\xcc\x81gypt', 'US'])
['Egypt', 'E\xcc\x81gypt', 'US']

This doesn't actually take locale into consideration.

Beyond this, try newer Python (yes I know) or ICU library from Martijn's linked question and respective answers.

Answer 2

Consider the following...

import unicodedata
from collections import OrderedDict
dict = {"United States": "United States", "Spain" : "Spain", "England": "England", "Égypt": "Égypt"}

import locale

# using your default locale (user settings)
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"fr_FR")

print OrderedDict(sorted(dict.items(),cmp= lambda a,b: locale.strcoll(unicodedata.normalize('NFD', unicode(a)[0]).encode('ASCII', 'ignore'),
                                                                       unicodedata.normalize('NFD', unicode(b)[0]).encode('ASCII', 'ignore'))))