On Mon, 07 Apr 2014 11:04:23 +0100 "howardnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <howardnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > just as I thought I had postgres mastered :) the ordering of strings is > causing me some confusion. > > Can someone explain how the database orders strings in the ORDER BY command. > > My example: > > My database is encoding is UTF-8, and default language is english, > > If I have a text column in a table with the following rows: > > 'a' > 'A' > '~' > > Then in UTF-8, I would expect the order to give me > > 'A' > 'a' > '~' > > But instead I get: > > '~' > 'a' > 'A' > > Is there anywhere in the documentation I can get a more detailed > explanation of this? Expect for the unexpected. SQL alphabetical sorting can get pretty complicated, as stated in this note from Oracle 10g Release 2 docs[1]: "In the ASCII standard, all uppercase letters appear before any lowercase letters. In the EBCDIC standard, the opposite is true: all lowercase letters appear before any uppercase letters". [1] docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch5lingsort.htm -- Alberto Cabello Sánchez <alberto@xxxxxxx> -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
