Confused about locales - Mailing list pgsql-general

From John Gunther
Subject Confused about locales
Date
Msg-id 44E730F7.7070705@bucksvsbytes.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: A slow query - Help please?  (Alban Hertroys <alban@magproductions.nl>)
Responses Re: Confused about locales  ("Tomi NA" <hefest@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-general
I've been reading about locales, encodings, sort orders, the to_ascii
function and, embarrasingly, I'm more confused than enlightened.:

What I want is very simple:
1) I want the database to correctly accept, store, and display
alphabetic characters, including European accented characters, in HTML
forms.
2) I want sorting to ignore the diacritical marks so that, for example,
u, u-accent, and u-umlaut are all sorted as if they were plain u.
3) I want sorting to ignore non-alphanumerics, letter case, and white space.

To illustrate, the following data is in sorted order:

St-Émile
stendahl
st ènders
St. Epson

Can someone tell me what combination of PostgreSQL and Linux settings I
need for this? It seems like a very basic question, but I'm just dense,
I guess. I've tried a half dozen time-consuming configs without success.

Thank you.

John Gunther

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