Can sorting Japanese kanji words be done programmatically?

Question

I\'ve recently discovered, to my astonishment (having never really thought about it before), machine-sorting Japanese proper nouns is apparently not possible.

I work

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with MeCab, but I think using MeCab is good idea.

Then, I'll introduce another method. If your app is written in Microsoft VBA, you can call "GetPhonetic" function. It's easy to use.

see : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa195745(v=office.11).aspx

---

Sorting prefectures by its pronunciation is not common. Most Japanese are used to prefectures sorted by 「都道府県コード」. e.g. 01:北海道, 02:青森県, …, 13:東京都, …, 27:大阪府, …, 47:沖縄県 These codes are defined in "JIS X 0401" or "ISO-3166-2 JP". see (Wikipedia Japanese) : http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%A8%E5%9B%BD%E5%9C%B0%E6%96%B9%E5%85%AC%E5%85%B1%E5%9B%A3%E4%BD%93%E3%82%B3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89