Let’s check this example of cities list:

  cities := []string{
    "Berlin",
    "Zurich",
    "Augsburg",
    "Bünde",
    "Budapest",
    "Ürkmez",
    "Rostock",
    "Ulm",
    "Lindau",
  }

If we use the standard way to sort strings with sort.Strings(cities) the result will be:

  [Augsburg Berlin Budapest Bünde Lindau Rostock Ulm Zurich Ürkmez]

As you can notice, Ürkmez ended up at the end of the list. And that’s not the correct order. Fortunately, Go has a powerful library golang.org/x/text/collate which could help us!

Package collate contains types for comparing and sorting Unicode strings according to a given collation order.

Let’s try to use it!

   c := collate.New(language.German, collate.IgnoreCase)
   c.SortStrings(cities)
   fmt.Println(cities)

It will print this result:

   [Augsburg Berlin Budapest Bünde Lindau Rostock Ulm Ürkmez Zurich]

Looks awesome! Right?

But what if you don’t sure in with language string was written? In this case, we can just use language.Und. Let’s check on this example:

  mixedLanguagesCities := []string{
    "Ürkmez",
    "Budapest",
    "Бохольт",
    "Арнсберг",
    "Інцель",
    "Їндржихув-Градец",
    "Єна",
    "Шатору",
    "Ястшембя-Ґура",
    "Ґрудзьондз",
    "Атланта",
    "Zurich",
  }

  c = collate.New(language.Und, collate.IgnoreCase)
  c.SortStrings(mixedLanguagesCities)
  fmt.Println(mixedLanguagesCities)

The result will be:

  [Budapest Ürkmez Zurich Арнсберг Атланта Бохольт Ґрудзьондз Єна Інцель Їндржихув-Градец Шатору Ястшембя-Ґура]

As you can see, it sorted correctly the mixed list of German and Ukrainian strings, according to official sorting rules.

That was it! Hope this information was helpful for you 😊

Example code you can find here

For more everyday Go mechanics, see mastering Golang for loops and mastering time in Go — both are full of small details that only bite in production.