Re: proposal: UTF8 to_ascii function

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.