Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
Sorting order is language specific, and some languages
handle some
accented letters as different letters of their own, not as simple
variations of the base letter.
Sorting is one thing, searching is another. Both are determined by
the language "collation" order. For example: In Swedish, A and Ä are
two different letters, but Á is just an accented version of A.
I just finished reading chapter 8 of the MySQL manual, covering new
features in MySQL version 4.1,
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Charset.html
The contents sounds promising for applications like Wikipedia. As far
as I know Wikipedia only uses MySQL 4.0.12 yet, but when 4.1 becomes
more stable it would be possible to use these new features. Among
them is the possibility to specify the collation order for fulltext
search (select match()) or sort (order by) operation. Each database,
table or column can also have a default collation. This means the
Hungarian Wikipedia could have the Hungarian collation as its default,
but a user could specify as her personal preference to use the English
collation (accent-ignorant) for her searches. I'm looking forward to
this.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se/