Tom Lane said:
> C locale basically means "sort by the byte sequence values". It'll do
> something self-consistent, but maybe not what you'd like for UTF8
> characters.
OK, that explains that. I guess I will need to try it out to see what the
effect is on extended character sets.
>> Our database is UNICODE with LC_COLLATE=en_US.iso885915.
> Does that sort rationally at all? I should think you'd need to specify
> an LC_COLLATE setting that's designed for UTF8 encoding, not 8859-15.
Er..., actually the LC_COLLATE for the DB in question is C - I was looking
at the wrong database (wrong telnet session)! So your comments above apply
in this case.
> If you only ever store characters that are in 7-bit ASCII then none of
> this will affect you, and you can get away with broken combinations of
> encoding and locale. But if you'd like to sort characters outside the
> minimal ASCII set then you need to get it right ...
Tom, thanks for the answers above.
I guess if I have some time I should build some different DBs with
different combinations of encoding and collations and summarise my
findings using different types of data and sort/search commands, in case
anyone else has the same level of confusion that I do...
John Sidney-Woollett