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<p>Hi, everyone. I'm working on a project on PostgreSQL 9.0 (soon
to be upgraded to 9.1, given that we haven't yet launched). The
project will involve numerous text fields containing English,
Spanish, and Portuguese. Some of those text fields will be
searchable by the user. That's easy enough to do; for our
purposes, I was planning to use some combination of LIKE searches;
the database is small enough that this doesn't take very much
time, and we don't expect the number of searchable records (or
columns within those records) to be all that large.</p>
<p>The thing is, the people running the site want searches to work
on what I'm calling (for lack of a better term) "bare" letters.
That is, if the user searches for "n", then the search should also
match Spanish words containing "ñ". I'm told by Spanish-speaking
members of the team that this is how they would expect searches to
work. However, when I just did a quick test using a UTF-8 encoded
9.0 database, I found that PostgreSQL didn't see the two
characters as identical. (I must say, this is the behavior that I
would have expected, had the Spanish-speaking team member not said
anything on the subject.)</p>
<p>So my question is whether I can somehow wrangle PostgreSQL into
thinking that "n" and "ñ" are the same character for search
purposes, or if I need to do something else -- use regexps, keep a
"naked," searchable version of each column alongside the native
one, or something else entirely -- to get this to work.</p>
<p>Any ideas?</p>
<p>Thanks,</p>
<p>Reuven<br>
</p>
<p> </p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Reuven M. Lerner -- Web development, consulting, and training
Mobile: +972-54-496-8405 * US phone: 847-230-9795
Skype/AIM: reuvenlerner
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