Re: sorting Chinese varchar field

> Hi,
>
> I installed postgres 8.0 for windows on my win xp (Simplified Chinese
> version). The encoding is unicode. When I set pgsql client encoding to
> gb18030, I could insert Chinese text from the command line to
> postgres.
>
> However, I could not get the sort order of Chinese varchar field to
> work properly.
>
> What I tried are as follows:
>
> 1)  installed postgres for windows and used the "C" locale.
> 2)  installed postgres for windows and used the "Chinese, PRC" locale.
>
> Again, in both cases, the backend encoding is unicode.
>
> The other interesting thing I observed was, when setting to the "C"
> locale, the following sql worked fine:
> select * from user where  name = 'xxxxx';
> xxxxx is a Chinese text
> However, if I set the locale to "Chinese, PRC" during installation,
> the above select did not get the any matching rows, where it should
> have got. In this case, the following worked fine:
> select * from user where name ilike 'xxxxx%';
>
> Could anyone let me know the best practice for using postgres to store
> Chinese text? (This should be the same problem I guess, for using
> postgres to store other languages than English.)

I would suggest to use UNICODE/C locale combo. On most systems the
locale database for multibyte encodings are broken as far as I
know. For the sorting problem, probably you could get the right sort
order by using convert. i.e.

SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE ... ORDER BY CONVERT(your_chinese_character, utf_8_to_gb_18030);

If above does not work, you cannot get the right sort order even if
you use GB18030 anyway.
--
Tatsuo Ishii