How do you sort or compare Strings in JavaScript based on a certain locale?

Question

I know there is a function called String.prototype.localeCompare which you can use, and you can send in as the second argument a list of locales.

string.localeCompare(compareString [, locales [, options]])

But if you look at the browser compatibility table, only Chrome supports it.

How do you sort or compare Strings in JavaScript based on a certain locale?

How does all the big websites do this, like ebay or amazon? They must have some kind of String sorting in the front-end.. right?

Answer 1

May be you need sorting, not compare?

Javascript array sort method sort strings on its Unicode(not ASCII) codes. You can sort array of strings to get it in alphabetical order.

['Собака', 'Кошка'].sort() will sort array to ["Кошка", "Собака"] which is right in Ru_ru locale.

You can add compare function like this:

['Собака', 'Кошка', 'Свекла'].sort(function(a, b) { 
    return a[1] > b[1]?1:-1;
})

Javascript will compare strings by Unicode character by character. In my example compare is inside a[1] > b[1] on native low-level code. Return -1 or 1 needs for sort function to replace array elements.