Sort dictionary by key using locale/collation

Question

The following code is ignoring the locale and Égypt goes at the end, what's wrong?

dict = {"United States": "United States", "Spain" : "Spain", "England": "England", "Égypt": "Égypt"}

import locale

# using your default locale (user settings)
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"fr_FR")
print OrderedDict(sorted(dict.items(), key=lambda t: t[0], cmp=locale.strcoll))

That is the output:

OrderedDict([('England', 'England'), ('Spain', 'Spain'), ('United States', 'United States'), ('\xc3\x89gypt', '\xc3\x89gypt')])

Answer 1

Consider the following...

import unicodedata
from collections import OrderedDict
dict = {"United States": "United States", "Spain" : "Spain", "England": "England", "Égypt": "Égypt"}

import locale

# using your default locale (user settings)
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"fr_FR")

print OrderedDict(sorted(dict.items(),cmp= lambda a,b: locale.strcoll(unicodedata.normalize('NFD', unicode(a)[0]).encode('ASCII', 'ignore'),
                                                                       unicodedata.normalize('NFD', unicode(b)[0]).encode('ASCII', 'ignore'))))