I do have a chance to mangle the text before comparison, but I don't want to remove spaces because I want them sorted before all the rest of the entries. Desired sort example:

3 Doors Down
30 Seconds To Mars
311

If I ignored spaces, then it would sort as:

30 Seconds To Mars
311
3 Doors Down

I guess I could replace the space character with a control character or such that had an index value lower than the rest of the visible characters (Palm StrCaselessCompare compares primarily by index), but that would only handle the space characters. The accent characters all have indexes above the normal alphabet, making them sort incorrectly on the Palm. On the computer with my Java Collator object, it will sort accented characters like this:

Vengaboys
Véronique Sanson
Vertical Horizon

Where on the Palm, the order would be:

Vengaboys
Vertical Horizon
Véronique Sanson

Wait a minute though, basically the sort in Java ignores accents, maybe I could do the same. I could replace all commonly accented characters with their unaccented equivilants. Let me do some testing! Thanks for getting my brain going again, this may be simpler than I thought.