SORTKEY Function

Required Arguments

string

character expression

locale

specifies the locale name in the form of a POSIX name (ja_JP). See Values for the LOCALE= System Option for a list of locale names and Posix values.

strength

The value of strength is related to the collation level. There are five collation-level values. The following table provides information regarding the five levels. The default value for strength is related to the locale.

Value	Type of Collation	Description
PRIMARY or P	PRIMARY specifies differences between base characters (for example, "a" < "b").	It is the strongest difference. For example, dictionaries are divided into different sections by base character.
SECONDARY or S	Accents in the characters are considered secondary differences (for example, "as" < "às" < "at").	Other differences between letters can also be considered secondary differences, depending on the language. A secondary difference is ignored when there is a primary difference anywhere in the strings.
TERTIARY or T	Upper and lower case differences in characters are distinguished at the tertiary level (for example, "ao" < "Ao" < "aò").	An example is the difference between large and small Kana. A tertiary difference is ignored when there is a primary or secondary difference anywhere in the strings.
QUATERNARY or Q	When punctuation is ignored at level 1-3, an additional level can be used to distinguish words with and without punctuation (for example, "ab" < "a-b" < "aB").	This difference is ignored when there is a primary, secondary, or tertiary difference. The quaternary level should be used if ignoring punctuation is required or when processing Japanese text.
IDENTICAL or I	When all other levels are equal, the identical level is used as a tiebreaker. The Unicode code point values of the NFD form of each string are compared at this level, just in case there is no difference at levels 1-4.	For example, only Hebrew cantillation marks are distinguished at this level. This level should be used sparingly, as only code point values differences between two strings is an extremely rare occurrence.

case order

sorts uppercase and lowercase letters. This argument is valid for only TERTIARY, QUATERNARY, or IDENTICAL. The following table provides the values and information for the case order argument.

Value	Description
UPPER or U	Sorts upper case letters first, then the lower case letters.
LOWER or L	Sorts lower case letters first, then the upper case letters.

numeric collation

orders numbers by the numeric value instead of the number's characters.

Value	Description
NUMERIC or N	Order numbers (integers) by the numeric value. For example, "8 Main St." would sort before "45 Main St.".

collation order

There are two types of collation values: Phonebook and Traditional. If you do not select a collation value, then the user's locale-default collation is selected. The following table provides more information.

Value	Description
PHONEBOOK or P	specifies a phonebook style ordering of characters. Select PHONEBOOK only with the German language.
TRADITIONAL or T	specifies a traditional style ordering of characters. Select TRADITIONAL only with the Spanish language.