Re: Sorting is ignoring spaces

On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 09:32:56AM -0500, Daniel Gaudreault wrote:
> One of our developers came across the fact that postgres is ignoring
> spaces when sorting results from a query.  We are using PGSQL 7.3.4 on
> the backend.  Is there something that needs to be set somewhere to for
> the sort to not ignore spaces?

This is locale related; Postgres just uses strcoll.  You could try
changing your locale, but it's difficult to do on an existing database.
I think the C locale orders by byte values, but most single-byte locales
have funny rules regarding whitespace.

See strcoll(3).

A workaround could be ask the server to sort not using the column
itself, but a function of it that replaces the spaces with something
else that has the desired sorting effect.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"¿Cómo puedes confiar en algo que pagas y que no ves,
y no confiar en algo que te dan y te lo muestran?" (Germán Poo)