International Business Machines Corporation

William B Nettles

Baldev Singh Soor

Daniel Alan Rose

Andreas Maier

Wolfgang Reichert

John S Kapernick

Edward Henry Daray

David Brush

Milos Lalovic

The invention relates to culturally sensitive sorting of records. The invention provides a method and a computer system for sorting a set of keyed records based on a preferred locale specification having collation information of a culture. The method is performed on a computer system operatively coupled to a computer readable memory storing the set of keyed records. The steps include reading a locale token associated with the set of records, the locale token identifying a preferred locale object having collation information, using the preferred locale object to locate and read the collation information, creating a culturally correct collation key for each data key associated with the each record, and using the created culturally correct collation keys to sort the set of records into a culturally correct sorted order.

Culturally correct ordering of keyed records

The present invention provides facilities for tagging files or data with attribute information in the form of a file tag (TAGINFO) which contains an identifier for text information (TEXTFLAG) and an attribute (COSID) for identifying encoding schemes. TXTFLAG is an auto conversion flag. Furthermore, a runtime attribute (process CCSLD) is assigned to a process specifying the runtime encoding scheme. A conversion is done automatically by an auto conversion function if both CCSIDs allow a conversion. Files having no file tag are tagged with a virtual file tag by means of an automatic tagging (AUTOTAG) function using heuristic rules for determining whether the data or file contains text or binary information. Old applications must work with untagged files as before. Existing applications should be able to benefit from auto conversion and thereby to be enabled to process new, tagged files without code changes.

File tagging and automatic conversion of data or files

A locale identification triplet is provided and a related computer implemented method, computer system and computer program for making practical use of the locale identification triplet. The identifier includes a table identifier, locale version identifier and a locale token. The locale token is the only mandatory identifier in the triplet and addresses the need to uniquely identify desired localization specifications through a concise unambiguous hexadecimal format. The locale version identifier addresses the need to allow multiple variations of the locale specification defined for a given 'root' locale, and the table identifier addresses the need to provide a mechanism to identify and distinguish a particular instance of a locale with regards to an environment (such as a system) or reference to an installation/application/user provided reference table.

Transmission of locale information

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

William B Nettles