On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 07:16:29PM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
Both space and tab sort lexically before digits (which start at 48
for
"0"). If you're using another whitespace codepoint by accident then it
will probably come above the digits and thus change the sort result.
That's true only in LC_COLLATE=C and a couple of other locales, certainly
not true for most other locales. Spaces/tabs and other non-alphanumeric
characters are often ignored for collation purposes, at least in the first
phase and they do make a difference only if strings without those characters
are identical. Similarly, digits may have smaller priority than alphabetic
characters etc., it all depends on your locale. Look at a vocabulary
for your specific language and see how things are sorted there.
If you want ASCII sorting, use
LC_ALL=C sort
Jakub