Chinese and Japanese Sorting (123271)
The information in this article applies to:
- Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) 3.1
This article was previously published under Q123271 SUMMARY
Chinese and Japanese use ideographic characters. There are at least three
major ways to sort ideographic characters:
- By strokes within radicals. Characters are sorted by radical first, then
by the number of strokes within the radical. Radicals themselves are
sorted by the number of strokes, in increasing order.
- By radicals within strokes. Characters are sorted by number of strokes
first, then by the order of the radicals.
- By pronunciation. Characters are sorted by their pronunciation (phonetic
order). Note that many Chinese characters have more than one
pronunciation.
Common Kanji dictionaries use all three sorting methods. Currently, most
applications bypass these issues because sorting tables for Asian code
pages are extremely large. Most often, the option is to sort by code
points, which works reasonably well. The lstrcmp() function compares two
strings by code points in Chinese and Japanese Windows.
Japanese Windows uses SHIFT-JIS, Traditional Chinese Windows uses Big-5,
and Simplified Chinese Windows use GB as their respective code pages.
| Modification Type: | Major | Last Reviewed: | 11/6/1999 |
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| Keywords: | KB123271 |
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