Sort order confusion

I am suffering some sort order confusion. Given a database, "foo",
with a single character(4) column of data left padded with spaces I
get:

select * from foo order by somechars;

somechars
-----------
0
1
10
100
1011
111
1512
2
222
3
333

The output I desire is a basic ASCII sort:

somechars
-----------
0
1
2
3
10
100
111
222
333
1011
1512

(This sample set just has spaces and numeric digits but could have
other characters - I want the output in ASCII sort order)

1. What is the correct way to do this?

2. How do I verify the locale setting of an existing database cluster
(to verify that I really initialized it as "initdb -d --locale=C -D
/var/lib/pgsql/data")?

3. Should I have included "--enable-locale" or similar option when I
built Postgresql (the build is vanilla 7.4.1 "./configure ; make ;
make install")?

Cheers,
Steve