Hi Olivier, All

In Firebird-Architect@yahoogroups.com, Olivier Mascia wrote:

> In a french dictionnary, the accented
> characters don't appear
> before or after the same letters without
> accent. They appear sorted with everything
> else, as if the accent was not there.

We are talking very rare cases here, so you may not
have spotted them. In fact, these case are most
likely to be seen with names and/or foreign words
mixed in.

[...]

> David, here are some extracts from a french dictionnary :
>
> eau-de-vie (no accents, means brandy)
> ébahi (e-cute bahi, means staggered)
> ...
> écarter (e-cute carter, means to spread)
> ecchymose (no accents, means bruise)
> ecclésiastique (eccl e-cute siastique, means ecclesiastical)
> écervelé (e-cute cervel e-cute, means scatty)
> ...
> So you can clearly see that the sequence does not take accents
> into account. This is true for all accents in french. These
> sentences are based on everyday-life facts in french.

The fr_FR collation as implemented in Firebird will agree!
Accents will only make in a difference in fr_FR,
if the entire strings have matching charcters!

French is all french to me, but German dictionary sort
order should be similiar enough:

Sud
Süd (for broken mail clients visualize Süd)
Sudan

The difference between u and ü is weak enough, to let
"Sudan" get the higher sort value. But the order of
"Sud" and "Süd" is not arbitrary, "Süd" has to be sorted
after "Sud".

Regards,
Peter Jacobi