I am looking for a deterministic way of sorting a list of strings.
Sorting a string of course often leads to the suggestion to use String.localeCompare. But the order must be deterministic, unrelated to the computer where it is running on.
The hardcore solution I came up with is hashing each string and compare these instead with a locale option en. Is there an easier solution?
The strings can be English, German, Chinese, Japanese, ...
Oddly, what fits your requirements is...the default sort:
theStrings.sort();
That sorts according to the UTF-16 code units in the strings, which doesn't vary by computer/locale/whatever. It treats the strings as (effectively) a series of 16-bit numbers (Unicode code units, to be precise).
From the specification:
If comparefn is not undefined, it should be a function that accepts two arguments x and y and returns a negative Number if x
<y, a positive Number if x>y, or a zero otherwise.
And the < and > operators are defined by the abstract IsLessThan operation in the specification, which compares by the code units in the string.