'order by' does "wrong" with unicode-chars (german umlauts)

postgres 7.3.2

I store unicode-data in postgresql. The data is retrieved via webinterfaces,
processed with perl and then stored in postgresql (and viceversa).

All is going nice with one problem. If performing a "select * order by
field"-query the result is not what I expected.

German umlauts (ie: Ö) are stored as doublechars ("Ö" is "Ö") and only the
first char seems to be taken into account when sorting.

So it happens that the order is like:

Österreich
America
Pakistan

instead of

Amerika
Österreich
Pakistan

How to deal with this Problem ? Of course converting to latin before storing
would be a solution but we plan to offer support for many non-latin languages
later and the meaning of unicode is to get rid of all this converting-stuff
after all.

thnx,
peter

--
IT-Consulting
mag. peter pilsl
tel:+43-699-1-3574035
fax:+43-699-4-3574035
pilsl(at)goldfisch(dot)at
http://www.goldfisch.at