Alphanumerical lists are sortable by alphabet and number, obviously, but if you have a list where each entry begins with a different punctuation mark (or any other kind of non-alphanumeric character), is there a similar standardised ordering method for them?
I imagine, for example, that a comma will come before whatever this is: ¦
I just tested an A-Z sort in Google Sheets where each cell was a different punctuation mark, and it seemed to rearrange what I’d entered into some sort of order, but is this order shared universally? Is there a global Unicode-compliant ordering method everyone uses?
Cheers!
Ascii numbers?
If your input is limited to ASCII, sure.
But ASCII is only a 7-bit standard, and only supports those characters needed by American English computer users in the 1960s. Lots of characters you might see in “plain text” are not part of ASCII; including all accented characters, all non-Latin alphabets, and many common symbols and punctuation marks including these: £€¢©™°
(Yes, you could get accented characters in the pre-Unicode days using 8-bit “extended ASCII”, e.g. IBM/Windows code pages. However, those are not really ASCII and they will break if the text is interpreted as the wrong code page.)
Unicode collation is the Right Thing today.
Removed by mod