On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 09:33:10PM +0100, Cédric Dufour (public) wrote: > Use the 'to_ascii' function to convert your string to the "no accent" ASCII > equivalent before accomplishing your comparison > > SELECT foo FROM table WHERE ( to_ascii(foo) ILIKE to_ascii('caractères > accentués') ); > > This does not work with all database locale (LATIN1 is OK, but LATIN9 is > not). > > I was actually wondering if this is efficient enough or if there is any more > efficient method to accomplish this...
I'd think that something like: CREATE FUNCTION lower_ascii (text) RETURNS text AS ' BEGIN RETURN lower(to_ascii($1)); END ' language 'plpgsql'; CREATE INDEX table_lower_ascii ON table(lower_ascii(field)); would perform better, since we can now use this index, whereas we couldn't do this with ILIKE to_ascii(...). Also, not sure it's a good idea to use ILIKE simply to get lower-case-matching. If the user string ends with '%', for instance, it will match everything-starting-with, which is probably not what the user meant. Better the check against lower(). There might be a better way specifically-oriented toward de-accentuation; this is just generic PG advice. - J. -- Joel BURTON | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | joelburton.com | aim: wjoelburton Independent Knowledge Management Consultant ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/faq.html