sorting Hungarian dictionary

Question

I'm trying to sort Hungarian words in the dictionary by alphabetical order. The expected order for all letters should be aábcdeéfggyhiíjklmnoóöőpqrsttyuúüűvwxyz

I was trying to use Intl.Collator() and localeCompare but the expected output was never right.

for example:

console.log(["baj", 'betűz', 'ä', "bácsi"].sort(new Intl.Collator('hu').compare));
//expected output ["ä", "baj", "bácsi", "betűz"]

what I got is Array ["ä", "bácsi", "baj", "betűz"]

á comes before a but should be after a

and it happened for é and í also.

I was trying to use

.sort(function(a, b) {
  let letterA = a.toUpperCase();
  let letterB = b.toUpperCase();
  if (letterA < letterB) {
    return -1;
  }
  if (letterA > letterB) {
    return 1;
  }
  return 0;
});

but words with specials signs were put at the end of the array which is not what I want.

Any suggestions on how can I resolve that issue?

Answer 1

You could sort by hand and get the wanted order with a given alphabet.

const
    alphabet = 'aábcdeéfggyhiíjklmnoóöőpqrsttyuúüűvwxyz',
    order = Object.fromEntries([].map((c, i) => [c, i + 1])),
    compare = (a, b) => {
        let i = 0,
            l = Math.min(a.length, b.length),
            r = 0;
            
        while (!r && i < l) {
            r = a[i] in order && b[i] in order ? order[a[i]] - order[b[i]] : a[i].localeCompare(b[i]);
            i++;
        }
        return r || a.length - b.length;
    }

console.log(...["baj", 'betűz', 'ä', "bácsi"].sort(compare)); // ["ä", "baj", "bácsi", "betűz"]