How can I sort an array of strings alphabetically when the strings contains åäö?

Question

I\'m building an app in xcode4.3/Objective-C and have come across a problem when trying to sort an NSMutableArray. I\'ll populate it with strings from a sqlite database. The

Answer 1

You can make it work by using compare:options:range:locale: and specifying Swedish locale explicitly, like this:

NSArray *strings=[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"as", @"ol", @"st", @"br", @"ög", @"år", @"ös", nil];
NSLocale *locale=[[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"sv_SE"];

NSArray *sorted=[strings sortedArrayUsingComparator:^(NSString *first, NSString *second) {
    return [first compare:second
                  options:0
                    range:NSMakeRange(0, [first length])
                   locale:locale];
}];

for (NSString *s in sorted) { NSLog(@"%@", s); }

The output is:

2012-04-10 08:08:18.139 Untitled[32416:707] as
2012-04-10 08:08:18.140 Untitled[32416:707] br
2012-04-10 08:08:18.141 Untitled[32416:707] ol
2012-04-10 08:08:18.142 Untitled[32416:707] st
2012-04-10 08:08:18.142 Untitled[32416:707] år
2012-04-10 08:08:18.143 Untitled[32416:707] ög
2012-04-10 08:08:18.143 Untitled[32416:707] ös