ForumsQuestionsSpecial character sequence in sort order?


Special character sequence in sort order?
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dan

Posted: Sep 30, 2015
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Can someone point me to info on exactly what the sequence of special characters are in the "alphabetic" sort sequence - either specifically in Toodledo, or generally in cloud or smartphone apps? Assuming they are the same, which may be a bad assumption...

I grew up with EBCDIC on IBM mainframes, and ASCII on everything else - but Toodledo (and maybe lots of other things) don't seem to use ASCII - at least, not consistently. Now, I realize an app can try to help by, for example, ignoring upper and lower case differences, stripping off leading blanks or words like "the"... But I am just talking about special characters at this point - asterisk, dollar sign, pound sign, etc.

I have a few special tasks that I want to sort to the front, and I use one asterisk or two asterisks. That works fine. Now I want one thing to sort in front of THOSE. No luck - leading spaces get stripped, and the lower sequence ASCII characters (like $ and #) seem to sort AFTER the asterisks.

And this is complicated for me by the fact that I am syncing tasks with Outlook on Windows using gsyncit - and what works there does not seem to work here...

Anyway, any help would be appreciated!
Dan
SES21

Posted: Sep 30, 2015
Score: 0 Reference
Just a SWAG but how about using _
dan

Posted: Sep 30, 2015
Score: 0 Reference
Posted by SES21:
Just a SWAG but how about using _


Well, that works for Toodledo, but not for Outlook. I think I am out of luck with getting both to work - they almost seem to have opposite sort sequences...

I can work something else out, but I still would like to understand what each one uses!

Dan
dan

Posted: Sep 30, 2015
Score: 0 Reference
! (exclamation mark) seems to sort ahead of everything else - and also works in Ultimate ToDo List, an Android app that syncs with Toodledo.

Lots of interesting discussions on the Interwebs about sorting - or collation, as the topic is more generally called. One person's "natural" sort sequence is someone else's chaos. Like, in Ireland, McDee and MacDee should sort together - at least, if a human will be retrieving the data - since there is no phonetic difference between the two. Or, that's what some people believe and expect!

Dan
Jake

Toodledo Founder
Posted: Oct 01, 2015
Score: 0 Reference
We use the Unicode rules for sorting and comparison of text. You can find all the nitty gritty details here: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/

Although I should mention that we currently do the sorting on the server. In the future we plan to move sorting into the browser, for performance reasons, and when we make this move, we may not be able to maintain perfect Unicode sorting and comparison.
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