421219 - String.localeCompare gives strange results on OS X

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 255192

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I'm not sure whether this is a valid bug, because I'm not sure that localeCompare is meant to be consistent across platforms.

The following testcase:
"\u767E\u5EA6\u77E5\u9053".localeCompare("Creative Commons");

returns 1 on Windows and Linux trunk builds. It returns -90 on Mac trunk builds.

Tony noticed this because it caused the search engine ordering code, which uses localeCompare to sort the engines, to behave differently on Linux compared to Mac.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Oh, I guess the browser probably ends up using the implmentation at http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsblame.cgi?file=mozilla/dom/src/base/nsJSEnvironment.cpp&rev=1.394#720 ? Probably not a JS bug, then...

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Indeed, I get the same result with the following testcase:

var localeService = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/intl/nslocaleservice;1"].
                    getService(Components.interfaces.nsILocaleService);
var localeCollator = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/intl/collation-factory;1"].
                     getService(Components.interfaces.nsICollationFactory).
                     CreateCollation(localeService.getApplicationLocale());
localeCollator.compareString(0, "\u767E\u5EA6\u77E5\u9053", "Creative Commons");

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Good catch! It looks like we are still using the old OS9 collation routines, not the Unicode-aware ones for OSX. The latter were checked in back in bug 95282, but I haven't done the code archæology to figure out if they were never turned on in the build  or turned off accidentally at some later date.

Turning them back on at this point is rather scary, since I don't know how much testing they've ever had. Can we target this for after 1.9?

Comment 4

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

I tried turning on the Unicode collation and almost immediately ran into crashes, and in fact it turns out that it was turned off in bug 128323 because of crashiness.

Comment 5

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Jungshik went down this road a few years ago...