Re: [HACKERS] Bug #659: lower()/upper() bug on

On Tue, 2002-05-14 at 03:29, Tatsuo Ishii wrote:
> > I think it is really not hard to do this for UTF-8. I don't have to know the
> > relation between the locale and the encoding. Look at this:
> > We can use the LC_CTYPE from pg_controldata or alternatively the LC_CTYPE
> > at server startup. For nearly every locale (de_DE, ja_JP, ...) there exists
> > also a locale *.utf8 (de_DE.utf8, ja_JP.utf8, ...) at least for the actual Linux glibc.
>
> My Linux box does not have *.utf8 locales at all. Probably not so many
> platforms have them up to now, I guess.

What linux do you use ?

At least newer Redhat Linuxen have them and I suspect that all newer
glibc's are capable of using them.

>
> > We don't need to know more than this. If we call
> > setlocale(LC_CTYPE, <value of LC_CTYPE extended with .utf8 if not already given>)
> > then glibc is aware of doing all the conversions. I attach a small demo program
> > which set the locale ja_JP.utf8 and is able to translate german umlaut A (upper) to
> > german umlaut a (lower).
>
> Interesting idea, but the problem is we have to decide to use exactly
> one locale before initdb. In my understanding, users willing to use
> Unicode (UTF-8) tend to use multiple languages. This is natural since
> Unicode claims it can handle several languages. For example, user
> might want to have a table like this in a UTF-8 database:
>
> create table t1(
> english text, -- English message
> germany text, -- Germany message
> japanese text -- Japanese message
> );
>
> If you have set the local to, say de_DE, then:
>
> select lower(japanese) from t1;
>
> would be executed in de_DE.utf8 locale, and I doubt it produces any
> meaningfull results for Japanese.

IIRC it may, as I think that it will include full UTF8 upper/lower
tables, at least on Linux.

For example en_US will produce right upper/lower results for Estonian,
though collation is off and some chars are missing if using iso-8859-1.

btw, does Japanese language have distinct upper and lower case letters ?

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Hannu