Forum - View topicMärchen Awakens Romance miss-sorted in the manga section?
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rage-demon
 Posts: 356 Location: WA, USA |
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I just noticed that Märchen Awakens Romance seems to be out of order in the encyclopedia list. For some reason it is placed at the end of the list while i'd expect to see it between Mantis Woman and Marionette Generation.
Guess list sorting doesn't like the letter "ä" 
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tord
 Posts: 14 Location: Norrkoeping, sweden |
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Actually "ä" is not just an "a" with two dots above... Its real place in the alphabet is between the "å" and "ö" (which is after "z") in the alphabets using this character. Like in the swedish one.
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anime_layer
 Posts: 46 |
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No, you're wrong. "Märchen" is German for "Fairy Tale" and if I want to look it up in a German dictionary you'll find it between "March" and "Marchesa". When sorting alphabetically, the ä (or ö/ü) just counts as an a (or o/u). |
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tord
Posts: 14 Location: Norrkoeping, sweden |
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Maybe so, in the german... But it doesn't matter, does it? Since this is english and as such it treats all unfamiliar characters by putting them last.
So does the german character "ä" has it's own place in the german alphabet or is it "just a character with dots above?" |
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anime_layer
Posts: 46 |
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No, it does matter if you care about sorting correctly. In alpabetical sorting ä is treated as an a and å would be sorted as aa since that's what it's an abbrivation of.
If you put all those non-english letter to the end of the list you treat them as non-alphabetical characters which they aren't. Doing so seems very closed-minded to me. Especially an English page about Japanese animation should be a bit more open to non-English characters and treat them accordingly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic -> Some info on where those letters actually came from and thus why they are sorted how they are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation -> Some info about sorting. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10420 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Us Close minded.... <sigh> that's a bit of an interesting way to see this. As explained in your second link above, numeric sorting is the way the computer industry, and thus the developpers of PHP and MYSQL, does things. It's not in our control to decide where and how "ä" is placed in the alphabet. We send a request for information to the database that looks a bit like this (I've simplified the syntax such that anyone can understand). "get information from database, sort by title" MySQL then provides us with the requested information, sorted alphabetically by a field called "title" (which is the anime / manga's title). For each item that is received our code then displays it in th elist the way we want it displayed, but in the order that it is provide to us. Short of writting a new sort algorhythm, there's not much we can do about the order that everything is listed. And no, we aren't going to do that as it would be a waste of time to correct such a small issue and implementing it would slow the site down. -t |
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anime_layer
Posts: 46 |
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No, I didn't mean it like that.
This is what I called close-minded. What's possible and what you should aim for are not always the same. The ideal is a correctly sorted list, considering all special sorting rules for non-English characters. If your answer is that this is too difficult I'm fine with that. If you say all non-English characters should go to the end of the list anyway I think that's close-minded. 
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10420 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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My Choice would be to have non english characters come right after their closest English relatives, regardless of where they go in their native language. This is kind of reverse closemindedness. I'd want the names to be where English language readers would expect them. If "ä" comes after a, then that is great. But if the {insert imaginary foreign country} put {╦}* after H and not after T, I'd still hant it after the T in our database, because that's where our readers would expect to find it. *This character doesn't exist in any language. |
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Dan42
Chief Encyclopedist
 Posts: 3782 Location: Montreal |
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I have to say this really surprised me. To my knowledge, MySQL was SUPPOSED to sort all accents correctly. By default, MySQL uses the iso-8859-1 character set (also known as latin1) with the swedish collation rules (sorting order), which should work for most uses.
But after a bit of research, it seems that ä is NOT part of the latin1 swedish collation. It *does* handle pretty much everything else, but not the ä for some reason. For reference, here is the sorting order: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ; < = > ? @ A a À Á  à à á â ã B b C c Ç ç D d Ð ð E e È É Ê Ë è é ê ë F f G g H h I i Ì Í Î Ï ì í î ï J j K k L l M m N n Ñ ñ O o Ò Ó Ô Õ ò ó ô õ P p Q q R r S s T t U u Ù Ú Û ù û V v W w X x Y y Ü Ý ü ý Z z [ Å å \ Ä Æ ä æ ] Ö ö ^ _ ` { | } ~ € ? ‚ ƒ „ … † ‡ ˆ ‰ Œ ? Ž ? ? ‘ ’ “ ” • – — ˜ ™ š › œ ? ž Ÿ ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª « ¬ ® ¯ ° ± ² ³ ´ µ ¶ · ¸ ¹ º » ¼ ½ ¾ ¿ × Ø ø Þ þ ß ÷ Notice how ë and ï are correctly sorted yet ä and ö are not (and ü is considered equal to y). Weird stuff, weird stuff indeed... |
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anime_layer
Posts: 46 |
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Couldn't you use another mysql collation?
I never did this myself but instead of latin1_swedish_ci (Swedish/Finnish) latin1_general_ci (Multilingual) might work better. Or even make everything UTF-8. Don't know how collation looks in that case, though. |
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rage-demon
Posts: 356 Location: WA, USA |
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Wow, i didn't know this would be such a difficult issue.
 Obviously i don't want to make a big issue out of this since there are better things that need to be taken care of. If this is such a complicated problem, i can live with the sorting as it is now. I'd prefer Tempest's method of sorting since it makes the most sense. I can imagine, however, that if this goes on too long we might come to the solution of calling it "Marchen" just to avoid the issue. Although truthfully it wouldn't bother me if that's how the name was recorded in the encyclopedia. That way i wouldn't have to open the Character Map each time i have to type "ä" (unless i'm able to do a cut-and-paste to get that character)
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