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Inside Macintosh: Text /

Chapter 5 - Text Utilities / Text Utilities Reference

Routines / Determining Sorting Order for Strings in the Same Language

CompareText

The CompareText function compares two text strings, making use of the string comparison information from a resource that you specify as a parameter. It takes both primary and secondary sorting orders into consideration and returns a value that indicates the sorting order of the first string relative to the second string.

FUNCTION CompareText (aPtr, bPtr: Ptr; aLen, bLen: Integer;
                      itl2Handle: Handle): Integer;

aPtr

A pointer to the first character of the first text string.

bPtr

A pointer to the first character of the second text string.

aLen

The number of bytes in the first text string.

bLen

The number of bytes in the second text string.

itl2Handle

A handle to a string-manipulation ('itl2') resource that contains string comparison information.

DESCRIPTION

CompareText returns -1 if the first string is less than the second string, 0 if the
first string is equal to the second string, and 1 if the first string is greater than the
second string.

The itl2Handle parameter is used to specify a string-manipulation resource. If the value of this parameter is NIL, CompareText makes use of the resource for the current script. The string-manipulation resource includes routines and tables for modifying string comparison and tables for case conversion and stripping of diacritical marks.

Specifying a resource as a parameter is described in the section "Obtaining Resource Information," beginning on page 5-4.

SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS

CompareText may move memory; your application should not call this function at interrupt time.

ASSEMBLY-LANGUAGE INFORMATION

The trap macro and routine selector for the CompareText function are

Trap macro	Selector
_Pack6	$001A