On Tue, 2002-10-22 at 22:10, Hervé Piedvache wrote: > The best way is to always save data in your database in the same format ... > upper or lower ... then create an index on your field classicaly ... > > CREATE INDEX ix_name ON mytable(name); > SELECT name FROM mytable WHERE name = '" . strtolower($Name) ."'; > > You will ever use the index ... and it's simple to implement ... > You can also easily do an update of your database like : > update mytable set name=lower(name); > to get all the old data in the good format ... > Do not forget to vacuum the table after that ! Yes, of course you can do that - I was assuming there was a reason why the poster wanted case preserved. I generally preserve case for email addresses, for example. Sometimes the LHS of an e-mail address is case sensitive, even though the RHS (domain name) may not be. Searching on such a field, however, I would probably want to search case insensitively. There are other reasons for preserving case, of course - especially the case that people write their names. I usually write my own name McMillan, and it _infuriates_ me when I see software that has translated that to Mcmillan. Lest you think that is easily computed, I know people with names which are correctly capitalised as Macindoe and Macinnes - the capitalisation is idiosyncratic. If you remove the capitalisation when you write those values to the file you are removing potentially valuable information. Finally, you should also consider: update mytable set name=lower(name) WHERE name != lower(name); will require a lot less vacuuming :-) Cheers, Andrew. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew @ Catalyst .Net.NZ Ltd, PO Box 11-053, Manners St, Wellington WEB: http://catalyst.net.nz/ PHYS: Level 2, 150-154 Willis St DDI: +64(4)916-7201 MOB: +64(21)635-694 OFFICE: +64(4)499-2267 Survey for free with http://survey.net.nz/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------
