Issues with german 'Umlaute'

Hello everybody,

I recently found a problem with sorting german 'Umlaute' . I hope the encoding
of this mail works ;-) :

Postgres puts Umlaute (i.e., ÄäÖöÜü) at the very end of the Alphabet, and
this is not the way it should be. I didn't check for the special Character
'ß', but its probably similar.

The canonical sort order for Umlaute is to treat them as two characters, like
this:
ä -> ae
ö -> oe
ü -> ue
ß -> ss
( and the same for upper case 'ÄÖÜ'. 'ß' does not have an upper case )

Well, I guess this might be difficult to implement and might have quite an
impact on performance. The solution I know from other databases consists of
inserting ä after a, ö after o, ü after u and ß after s. Afaik this is
generally accepted.

upper() does not handle Umlaute correctly as well. It leaves äöü unchanged
instead of converting them to upper case.

All this happens with a database created with encoding ='latin1'. If there
are better results with a different encoding (I didn't try it yet), I'd
suggest adding some information about this in the documentation.

Thanks for your work,

N.Erichsen

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