How can I sort strings in multiple languages?

Is it possible to use the bubble sort algorithm to sort strings?

• Answer:

  Bubble sort will be able to sort the items lexicographically, if you first assign the strings a relative value. The way strcmp in the C library does this is by returning the difference of the first different characters between the strings. For instance, if you call strcmp("Hello", "Highway"), strcmp will return 'e'-'i'. The ascii value of e on a unix system is 101 and the ascii value of i is 105, so it is returning the value 101-105 = -4 which will tell you that "Hello" is lexicographically smaller than "Highway". Doing this, you should be able to use any algorithm you want to sort the strings.