Q123271: Chinese and Japanese Sorting

Article: Q123271
Product(s): Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit
Version(s): WINDOWS:3.1
Operating System(s): 
Keyword(s): 
Last Modified: 06-NOV-1999

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The information in this article applies to:

- Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) 3.1 
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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.

Additional query words: fesdk DBCS

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Keywords          :  
Technology        : kbAudDeveloper kbWin3xSearch kbSDKSearch kbWinSDKSearch kbWinSDK310
Version           : WINDOWS:3.1

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