What is collation and sorting in Perl?

Collation and sorting in Perl refer to the process of arranging data into a specific order based on locale-specific rules. This is particularly important when dealing with strings that may contain characters from various languages since different languages may have different sorting orders.

Perl provides several functions and modules for performing collation and sorting, which can be customized according to the needs of the application or the requirements of the specific locale.

Example of Collation and Sorting in Perl

# Sample Perl code to demonstrate sorting use strict; use warnings; use locale; # Change the locale to French $ENV{LANG} = 'fr_FR.UTF-8'; use POSIX qw(locale_h); our $LC_COLLATE = 'fr_FR.UTF-8'; my @words = ('éléphant', 'apple', 'éclair', 'banana'); # Sort words according to the current locale my @sorted_words = sort @words; print "Sorted words:\n"; print join(", ", @sorted_words), "\n";

Collation Sorting Perl Locale String Arrangement