1. A method for establishing a collating order between a first text string and a second text string, the first text string and the second text string consisting of characters belonging to a language which has a predefined character precedence, the method being operable in a computer system having a processor and a memory connected to the processor and containing locations for storing information including the first text string and the second text string and comprising the steps of: (a) defining at least one ordering value for each character based on the predefined character precedence the language; (b) storing ordering values for all characters in the memory; (c) retrieving from the memory pairs of characters including a first character from the first text string and a second character from the second text string; (d) retrieving an ordering value for the first character and an ordering value for the second character; (e) performing a comparison of the retrieved ordering values of the characters to determine a difference between the first and the second text string; and (f) computing a minimum trailing match length value for each position in the second text string.