[MarkLogic Dev General] Sorting pinyin text?

[Mary Holstege]

On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:05:45 -0700, Marc Moskowitz  
<mmoskowitz at ifactory.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to sort transliterations of Chinese words by standard pinyin  
> sorting (syllable alphabetically, then by tone, followed by the next  
> syllable). Is there a collation in either English or Chinese that deals  
> correctly with this? If not, is there some way of creating a  
> user-defined sort order? I know that I can create a sortable form for  
> each word that sorts correctly by codepoint, but I would rather do  
> something more efficient if possible.
> Marc Moskowitz
> Interactive Factory
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The collation named "http://marklogic.com/collation/zh" ought to
do what you want.  Pinyin is the default ordering for (mainland)
Chinese.  There is no way of defining your own collation.  In
theory you could write your own ordering function that operated
on the strings, but it would be fairly painful and slow I imagine.

//Mary

Mary Holstege
Lead Engineer
Mark Logic Corporation