Japanese Sort Orders

The Japanese dictionary sort orders sort characters by the Japanese NLS (National Language Support) provided by the Japanese versions of Microsoft® Windows NT® and Microsoft Windows® 95/98. The dictionary sort orders are available in case-sensitive and case-insensitive formats.

NLS is sorted phonetically with the following rules:

• Numerals are sorted in ascending order.
• Symbols are sorted by code order.
• For a representing character, no distinction is made between the single-character width and double-character width versions.

  For katakana, alphabet, and special characters, the shift-JIS character set (code page 932) has two codes for each character, with one single-character width and one double-character width. For example, there is a single-character width A and a double-character width A.

• A long vowel is regarded as representing its preceeding vowel.
• A voiced constant and a Japanese voiceless sound. For example, ba and pa are considered the same as ha.

  The binary sort order sorts characters by the code order of the shift-JIS character set.