POSIX generalizes the notion of a character to that of a
collating element. It defines a collating element to be "a
sequence of one or more bytes defined in the current collating sequence
as a unit of collation."
This generalizes the notion of a character in
two ways. First, a single character can map into two or more collating
elements. For example, the German
"es-zet"
collates as the collating element `s' followed by another collating
element `s'. Second, two or more characters can map into one
collating element. For example, the Spanish `ll' collates after
`l' and before `m'.
Since POSIX's "collating element" preserves the essential idea of
a "character," we use the latter, more familiar, term in this document.
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