Thread: case insensitive search with greek characters

Hi all,

I 'm testing postgres 8.0 beta 1 an i have the following problem. I have
a field with value Γιάννης. If i execute the following query it does not
returns any rows.

select * from test where descr ilike '%γιαννης%'

if i change the query to

select * from test where descr ilike '%γιάννης%'

everything is fine. As you can see the problem is at char α .
I 'm using ENCODING = 'ISO_8859_7'. I also tried with unicode but no luck.

An suggestions?

Thanks,
Gvre

Giannis Vrentzos <gvre@NOSPAM.gvre.gr> writes:
> ... everything is fine. As you can see the problem is at char � .
> I 'm using ENCODING = 'ISO_8859_7'. I also tried with unicode but no luck.

upper/lower casing behavior depends on locale, not encoding (though you
also need to be sure your encoding is what the selected locale expects).
I suspect you initdb'd with the wrong locale environment settings.
Check by doing
    show lc_ctype;
    show lc_collate;
If it's not the right thing then you'll need to re-initdb :-(

            regards, tom lane

Giannis Vrentzos wrote:
> I 'm testing postgres 8.0 beta 1 an i have the following problem. I
> have a field with value Γιάννης. If i execute the following query it
> does not returns any rows.
>
> select * from test where descr ilike '%γιαννης%'
>
> if i change the query to
>
> select * from test where descr ilike '%γιάννης%'
>
> everything is fine. As you can see the problem is at char α .

As far as I can see, this is correct, because the pattern in the second
query indeed does match you value whereas the first doesn't.  Did you
expect ilike to be accent-insensitive?  It is not.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

Tom Lane wrote:
> Giannis Vrentzos <gvre@NOSPAM.gvre.gr> writes:
>
>>... everything is fine. As you can see the problem is at char α .
>>I 'm using ENCODING = 'ISO_8859_7'. I also tried with unicode but no luck.
>
>
> upper/lower casing behavior depends on locale, not encoding (though you
> also need to be sure your encoding is what the selected locale expects).
> I suspect you initdb'd with the wrong locale environment settings.
> Check by doing
>     show lc_ctype;
>     show lc_collate;
> If it's not the right thing then you'll need to re-initdb :-(

The problem is not with upper-lower case but with one letter (α) and
(ά). I executed show lc_ctype and show lc_collate and postgres returned
'Greek_Greece.1253' and i cannot find an encode like this in postgres. I
also don't want to change the encoding every time i change the db server
machine.

Thanks for responding,
Gvre