"David E. Wheeler" <david@kineticode.com> writes:
> So, the upshot is that the = and <> operators are not locale-aware,
> yes? They just do byte comparisons. Is that really the way it should
> be? I mean, could there not be strings that are equivalent but have
> different bytes?
We intentionally force such strings to be considered non-equal.
See varstr_cmp, and if you like see the archives from back when
that was put in.
The = and <> operators are in fact consistent with the behavior of
varstr_cmp (and had better be!); they're just optimized a bit.
regards, tom lane