Post by @mastomuckle@mastodon.social
When you have a list of places from all around the world and want to order them alphabetically & group by letter, but without the article, so you don't have a ton of places like The Mill under "T", how do you get rid of the articles, considering the fact that these articles are not just in English?
Because my current (and probably stupid) solution is a regex that keeps growing.
And I'm spending my evening reading up on the grammar of languages I'll probably never learn.
@anatudor But doesn't it seem odd to list El Paso, Texas, as "Paso, El?" And isn't there a comparable issue with all of the Norths, Wests, and News that appear in such lists?
@mastomuckle This is not about cities. It's about specific locations like "The Mill" example I gave. And I'm also not talking about display names in the list, those I'm not touching.
@anatudor @mastomuckle The same point applies to venue names, though. "El Mocambo" in Toronto would be alphabetized under E even if a similar name in Mexico might be alphabetized under M.
I agree with the other suggestion that you really need a separate data field to store the alphabetize-by string separate from the display string, and you need human judgment to confirm it's correct even if you have a regex to suggest a value when you enter the data.