Cldr Collation

A NIF-based Unicode collator based upon the Unicode library libicu4c. Builds upon the erlang library erlang-ucol by Benoit Chesneau benoitc@e-engura.org and Nicolas Dufour nrdufour@gmail.com

This initial version uses only the "root" locale collator which is the CLDR DUCET collator.

Installation

ex_cldr_collation depends upon libicu to provide the underlying collator. There are two required components:

• At build time (compilation), the libicu development headers are are required. On MacOS these headers are provided as part of the library. For Linux systems the package typically called libicu-dev is required.

• At runtime the libicu library is required. On MacOS and Ubuntu this library is delivered as part of the OS. For Alpine and Debian the icu package needs to be installed.

Installation on MacOS

On MacOS, the relevant headers are included in ex_cldr_collation and no additional installation is required. The build process will link to the MacOX native icucore library.

However it is also possible to use another installation of libicu if, for some reason, the native installation is not sufficiently up-to-date. An installed icu4c will take precedence over the native icucore library. For example, the following will install icu4c (which includes libicu), and link it into the standard search path. When compiling, this installation will take precendence.

% brew install icu4c
% brew link icu4c
# Remove any old build of the NIF that may have been linked to the native icucore lib
% rm ./deps/ex_cldr_collation/priv.ucol.so
% mix deps.compile ex_cldr_collation

Installation on Linux

On Linux systems, libicu-dev, libicu and pkg-conf must be installed and well as basic development tools for the build process.

# For Ubuntu
# pkg-config and libicu are required for compiling the NIF
# assumes libicu is already installed which is normal on Ubuntu
$ sudo apt-get install pkgconf libicu-dev

# For Debian
# pkg-config and icu-dev are required when compiling the NIF
# libicu is required at runtime
# Debian Bullseye
$ sudo apt install pkgconf libicu-dev libicu67
# Debian Bookworm
$ sudo apt install pkgconf libicu-dev libicu72

# For Alpine
# pkg-config and icu-dev are required when compiling the NIF
# icu is required at runtime
$ apk add pkgconf icu-dev icu

# Then check that the libicu package dependencies
# can be resolved
$ pkg-config --libs icu-uc icu-io
-licuio -licui18n -licuuc -licudata

Installing ex_cldr_collation

The package can then be installed by adding cldr_collation to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:ex_cldr_collation, "~> 0.7.0"}
  ]
end

Examples

  # Sorting using Cldr.Collator.sort/2
  iex> Cldr.Collation.sort(["á", "b", "A"], casing: :sensitive)
  ["A", "á", "b"]

  iex> Cldr.Collation.sort(["á", "b", "A"], casing: :insensitive)
  ["á", "A", "b"]

  # Comparing strings
  iex> Cldr.Collation.compare("a", "A", casing: :insensitive)
  :eq

  iex> Cldr.Collation.compare("a", "A", casing: :sensitive)
  :lt

  # Using Elixir 1.10 Enum.sort
  # Cldr.Collation.Sensitive, Cldr.Collation.Insensitive
  # comparise modules are provided

  iex> Enum.sort(["AAAA", "AAAa"], Cldr.Collation.Insensitive)
  ["AAAA", "AAAa"]

  iex> Enum.sort(["AAAA", "AAAa"], Cldr.Collation.Sensitive)
  ["AAAa", "AAAA"]