GTL BeginGraph Collation=Binary: What does it mean?

[ShaneRosanbalm]

When using the TMPLOUT= option in SGPLOT, the resulting code has COLLATION=BINARY on the BEGINGRAPH statement.

   define statgraph sgplot;

   begingraph / collation=binary datacolors=(CXFF0000 CX008000 CXB26306);

   ...

I cannot find the option COLLATION in the documentation. Does anybody out there know what it does?

[Jay54 · Accepted solution]

This is an undocumented GTL option used for sorting.  Collation can be BINARY or LINGUISTIC (Default).  BINARY collation uses the system encoding.  For ASCII "Z" comes before "a".  For EBCDIC "z" comes before "A".   So the sort order can change based on encoding, and words with upper case and lower case are in separate blocks.  In LINGUISTIC collation, lower and upper case letters come adjascent, so you get expected results, like in a dictionary.

See:  http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2007/297-2007.pdf

Note, this option is undocumented, so it has not received extensive user level testing.   If you use it, it is at your own risk.

[ShaneRosanbalm]

> this option is undocumented

No wonder I couldn't find it!

Thanks for the explanation. This confirms my suspicion that I can simply ignore (or even delete) this option when capturing GTL code produced by the TMPLOUT option of SGPLOT.