JavaScript Academy · Lesson

Locale-Aware Sorting

Sort strings correctly with Intl.Collator.

Why Default Sort Fails

Array sort() compares strings by UTF-16 code units. That puts uppercase before lowercase and mishandles accents — wrong for human-readable lists.

const words = ["banana", "Apple", "cherry"];
console.log([...words].sort()); // ["Apple","banana","cherry"] — capital wins

String.prototype.localeCompare compares two strings using locale rules, returning negative, zero, or positive.

console.log("apple".localeCompare("banana")); // -1
console.log("banana".localeCompare("apple")); // 1