vEdit uses a "collate table” to control the order in which characters are sorted. This is much more flexible than the typical sort utility that simply orders all characters by their hex value.
For example, by modifying the collate table, you could have vEdit:
- Sort digits before or after letters.
- Sort punctuation before or after letters.
- Fully control how European characters are sorted; correctly sort any character set (code page).
vEdit is supplied with these collate tables:
- COLLANSI.TBL
- This collate table equates Tabs, Spaces and Nulls; the sort order is punctuation, digits, letters, followed by graphics (8th-bit) characters. It sorts European characters, e.g. “um-laut-u” after “u” according to the ANSI character set.
- COLLOEM.TBL
- This collate table is identical to collansi.tbl, except that it sorts European characters according to the OEM character set.
- COLLEBC.TBL
- This collate table is designed for EBCDIC (mainframe) files.
- COLLDEF.TBL
- This is the default collate table which is automatically loaded if no other table is explicitly loaded. By default it is a copy of collansi.tbl since most Windows programs use the ANSI character set. If you usually work with the OEM character set, you can copy colloem.tbl to colldef.tbl.
If you need to load a different collate table, you can manually load it from within vEdit or have vEdit automatically load it at startup.
Manually Load a Collate Table