Is there anything that will sort after the alphabet?

Avi Dee

I have a collection of “cash” accounts that are intermixed with my “checking” accounts. Since Quicken Mac doesn’t allow manual arranging of accounts, I figured that I would add some prefix characters to the account name to force it to the end of the list.

Something I found that works is to prefix the name with “z ”, like “z Apple ID” for my Apple ID balance, or “z Cash App” for my Cash App balance.

However, “z” is a bit ugly, so I wanted to change to using some random Unicode character instead. What I’ve found, though, is that _everything_ sorts first, not last.

I tried ﹍ and ⌇ and ⌯ and ⑇ and 😀 and everything sorts first. I could add those to my checking accounts to force them first, but I do transfers to them, so I’d prefer they stay with their actual names.

Is there a character that will sort _after_ the alphabet for use in the account list?

jacobs

Here are two symbols that sort after z: Ω (option+z) and π (option+p). I used to use Ω for this, but decided it's not really any better than z.

Avi Dee

OOooooh I found one!

U+1427, or CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL MIDDLE DOT is ᐧ and unlike all the other middle dots, it sorts last.

jacobs

Here are two symbols that sort after z: Ω (option+z) and π (option+p). I used to use Ω for this, but decided it's not really any better than z.

Avi Dee

> @jacobs said:
> Here are two symbols that sort after z: Ω (option+z) and π (option+p). I used to use Ω for this, but decided it's not really any better than z.

Seems like the entire Greek alphabet does, so for now I think I’m going with Xi, Ξ. It still would be nice to arrange them in any order manually.

Thanks!

Avi Dee

OOooooh I found one!

U+1427, or CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL MIDDLE DOT is ᐧ and unlike all the other middle dots, it sorts last.

jacobs

What keys produce that symbol?

Avi Dee

> @jacobs said:
> What keys produce that symbol?

None on the English keyboard.

I use an app called UnicodeChecker (https://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/) to look through all of Unicode. But the ᐧ that I put into these posts is the actual dot that works, so copy and paste the ᐧ from this post to use it in Quicken.

Until the Quicken folks add in ordering of accounts, of course

UKR

In Quicken for Windows I use the Tilde character (~) for that purpose, because it's ASCII 126 and therefore the highest character available on the keyboard for sorting ... in Windows ... have you tried ~ yet on your Mac?

jacobs

Very few computer systems these days rely on ASCII 126.

On a Mac — not just in Quicken, but in the overall operating system and other programs like Excel, the tilde character (and other basic special characters) sorts alphabetically above letters and numbers, not below. 

In macOS, the character set is Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16), but even knowing a Unicode character's value isn't helpful in determining sort order. Since Unicode has been added to over the years (think emoji in recent years), and it wasn't logical to simply have the newest characters always sort to the end just because they were newer, there needs to be a different method for determining sort order. And of course, different languages need to be able to do it differently. The solution is what's called the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), an algorithm which produces binary keys from strings representing text in any language that can be represented with Unicode. The keys can be compared byte by byte in order to sort or collate them according to the rules of the language and with the option to ignoring case, accents, etc. I've read about this some, but it gets very technical, so I usually resort to trial and error when looking to create a custom sort order!

Avi Dee

@UKR thank you for your answer.

Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac are completely different programs, so what works for one might or might not work for the other. @jacobs is correct in that Quicken Mac does Unicode sorting, and the collation is wildly different than one might expect from ASCII. That’s why I posted here, to see if anything found anything that collated at the end.