Yeah, I got that the reason is linguistic in its origin. It is great when trying to search a mass of text. But when you try to do a matching search for an exact string it does complicate things a lot when you still think that = really means exactly equal.
Doing WHERE username = 'myname' I (as a programmer) never ever want to match anything else but exactly that. Doing WHERE article LIKE '%cake%' I would not at all be this critical or surprised since it is a different kind of searching in my world. Also, I was under the mistaken impression that COLLATE was ONLY related to how to sort these special characters. This I have not problem with either btw. Previously, I had no idea that collation also affected simple matching searches. The equal sign has a special place in my heart. :) I guess the binary collation will be my preference for general data. Do you have any advice for a web-application with multiple languages? You can only take advantage of the linguistic advantages as long as the language in the data and the collation match. How would cater for, say, a blog in both german and french? Set the database defaults to general or binary and then add COLLATE utf8_french_ci to the queries? thanks Martin On Jun 13, 4:28 pm, "Jonathan Snook" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > A am a bit shocked that it is a "feature" when å is the same as a in > > MySQL. That sounds just plain wrong to me. If it had been so for > > utf8_some_special_ci, fine, but not for general (the default default) > > collations. To me that would be like PHP saying (1 == 1.2) is true > > because it is "close enough". :) Very strange but I guess they must > > have some very good reason for it. > > It's not really the same thing and yes, there's a very good reason. > Most languages, diacritics are meant to alter the pronunciation of a > letter. In other words, e, é and è are the same "letter" but have > different pronunciations because of the accent marks. Therefore, when > a French person does a search for a word, they might simply type in > "ecole" but they fully expect école to show up. Another example, I > live in a city known as Orléans but has been known as Orleans (note > the lack of accent) for a number of years (they only recently added > the accent back in where it belongs). However, a search for Orleans > should bring up either result. Also, collations determine how content > is ordered when results are returned. Take Ecole A, ecole B, École C > and école D. How should that be ordered? The _ci indicates > case-insensitive so we get the order we expect (as I've listed). It'd > be pretty confusing to do a search and get ecole B, Ecole A, [the rest > of the latin character results], école D, École C. > > I hope that explains it a little better. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" group. To post to this group, send email to cake-php@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
