About
Order in text data is defined by:
- the order of character in the character set.
- the language directionality
Order in text is known as collation
See therefore the collation page for the whole picture
Type
Language directionality
The language directionality (known also as character order) specifies the axis and direction of the text readability (ie Left To Write, Write To Left, Top to Bottom).
Character Set Order
There are two main groups of encoding schemes:
- on Unix machines, the scheme is usually ASCII,
- whereas the majority of mainframes use EBCDIC.
ASCII
ASCII sorts as follows:
- numbers
- upper case characters (A-Z)
- lower case characters (a-z)
EBCDIC
EBCDIC sorts in the reverse order:
- lower case characters (a-z)
- upper case characters (A-Z)
- numbers