On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 01:48:00PM -0700, CSN wrote: > db=>select ascii('?'); > ascii > ------- > 226 > > db=>select id from news where body ilike '%?%'; > (0 rows) > > db=>select id from news where body ilike '%' || > chr(226) || '%'; > db'> > db'>^C > db=> What's going on with the last query? The prompt change suggests that psql is confused with quoting, and the ^C looks like you hit Control-C to get the regular prompt back. Did you ever run this query? If it produced no rows then you could widen the search. Example: SELECT id FROM news WHERE body ~ '[\200-\377]'; You could use the "string from pattern" variant of substring() to extract characters in a specific range. If you have PL/Perl then it would be trivial to extract all of and only the special characters along with their ASCII codes: CREATE FUNCTION special_chars(text) RETURNS text AS ' return join(" ", map {"$_:" . ord($_)} $_[0] =~ /[\200-\377]/g); ' LANGUAGE plperl IMMUTABLE STRICT; SELECT id, special_chars(body) FROM news WHERE body ~ '[\200-\377]'; -- Michael Fuhr ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match