Re: Foreign character struggles

Tim Perdue <tim@perdue.net> writes:
> I compiled postgres with --enable-multibyte and --enable-recode, and it
> doesn't appear to help with my problem.

I think this is a locale issue, not a character set issue.  You
definitely need --enable-locale, but I doubt you need either of the
above (unless you need to deal with Unicode or Far-Eastern languages).

> If an end-user types plain-english Sao Paulo, I want the database to pull up
> "S�o Paulo", essentially just treating the accented characters as if they were 
> regular ASCII.

I'd suggest matching on "upper(city)" to get rid of accents; given the
right locale setting that should work, and you can add a functional
index to make it fast.

> Also, my "Up Arrow" and "Delete" keys no longer work since I recompiled 7.2.3
> on debian.

You are missing libreadline.
        regards, tom lane