Intl.Locale.prototype.collations

Collation is the process of ordering strings of characters. It is used whenever strings must be sorted and placed into a certain order, from search query results to ordering records in a database. While the idea of placing strings in order might seem trivial, the idea of order can vary from region to region and language to language. The collations property returns an array of all collation types commonly used for the Locale, sorted in alphabetical order, with the standard and search values always excluded. If the Locale already has a collation, then the returned array contains that single value.

Below is a list of the supported collation types, adapted from the Unicode collation specification.

big5han

Pinyin ordering for Latin, big5 charset ordering for CJK characters (for Chinese)

Warning: The big5han collation type is deprecated, not available in Firefox, Chrome or Edge.

compat

A previous version of the ordering, for compatibility (for Arabic)

dict

Dictionary style ordering (for Sinhala)

direct

Binary code point order

Warning: The direct collation type has been deprecated. Do not use.

ducet

The default Unicode collation element table order

Warning: The ducet collation type is not available to the Web. Use the und locale without a collation type specifier instead. und is the collation that is the closest to ducet.

emoji

Recommended ordering for emoji characters (for the und locale)

eor

European ordering rules (for the und locale)

gb2312

Pinyin ordering for Latin, gb2312han charset ordering for CJK characters (for Chinese)

Warning: The gb2312 collation type is deprecated, not available in Firefox, Chrome or Edge.

phonebk

Phonebook style ordering (for German)

phonetic

Phonetic ordering (sorting based on pronunciation; for Lingala)

pinyin

Pinyin ordering for Latin and for CJK characters (for Chinese)

reformed

Reformed ordering (formerly for Swedish)

Warning: Do not use explicitly. This is the old name for the default ordering for Swedish whose collation naming used to differ from other languages. Since this was the default, request sv instead of requesting sv-u-co-reformed.

search

Special collation type for string search

Warning: Do not use. In Intl.Collator, this collation is activated via the search value for the usage option. Furthermore, there is currently no API for actually using the collator for search.

searchjl

Special collation type for Korean initial consonant search

Warning: Do not use. This collation is meant for searching, but Intl.Collator provides an API only for sorting.

standard

Default ordering for each language, except Chinese (and, previously, Swedish)

Warning: Do not use explicitly. In general, it's unnecessary to specify this explicitly and specifying this for Swedish is problematic in case the naming of the Swedish collations is changed to be consistent with other languages in the future.

stroke

Pinyin ordering for Latin, stroke order for CJK characters (for Chinese)

trad

Traditional style ordering (such as in Spanish)

unihan

Radical-stroke ordering for Han characters (for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Pinyin ordering for Latin in the case of Chinese.

Note: The unihan collation type is not available in Chrome or Edge.

zhuyin

Pinyin ordering for Latin, zhuyin order for Bopomofo and CJK characters (for Chinese)

If the Locale object doesn't have a collation already, the collations property lists all commonly-used collation types for the given Locale. For examples of explicitly setting a collation, see collation examples.

const locale = new Intl.Locale("zh");
console.log(locale.collations); // ["pinyin", "stroke", "zhuyin", "emoji", "eor"]

• Intl.Locale
• Intl.Locale.prototype.collation