Re: proposal: UTF8 to_ascii function

2008/8/11 Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>:
> On Monday 11 August 2008 16:23:29 Jan Urbański wrote:
>> Often clients want their searches to be
>> accented-or-language-specific letters insensitive. So searching for
>> 'łódź' returns 'lodz'. So the use case is there (in fact, the lack of
>> such facility made me consider not upgrading particular client to 8.3...).
>
> These are valid ideas, but then please design a new function that addresses
> your use case in a well-defined way, and don't overload questionable old
> interfaces for new purposes.
>
> In the Unicode standard you can find well-defined methods to decompose
> characters into diacritic marks, and then you could strip them off.  But this
> has nothing to do with ASCII or UTF8 or encodings.  Cyrillic characters can
> have diacritic marks as well, for example.
>

Hi Peter,

changes to_ascii from text to bytea is more bugfix than new feature
and should be done immediately. Correct conversions are related to
colum collation - is not necessary repeat same work and same code from
some unicode libs.

Regards
Pavel