[TYPO3-dev] OT: special characters in SQL

[Christian Lerrahn]

Hi,
this is not really a question that's specific to Typo3. However, maybe
somebody else has had the problem before and found a solution.
I'm writing an extension that creates an alphabetical index of the site.
It will always display the pages with titles starting with the selected
letter. However, if I do this with A-Z and 0-9, I will still miss out the
special characters in some languages other than English. For example, I
will not be able to display pages that start with the German umlauts
ä,ö,ü or the Scandinavian ø. I've been thinking of just having a list
that declares them equivalent with an ASCII character. E.g. in German you
would find ä among a entries, ö among o entries, etc. The problem now is
that I can't find a machine independent way to encode the special
character. If I write e.g. an "ö", the editor will choose some encoding
which might be different from the server's default. If I try to use an
index in the extended ASCII table, the extended ASCII table might not be
the same on all systems. So how do I get this to be universal?

Cheers,
Christian

-- 
    /Der Herr sprach zu Mose:/ Ich will ihnen einen Propheten, wie du
    bist, erwecken aus ihren Brüdern und meine Worte in  seinen  Mund
    geben.
    
    5.Mose 18,18
    
    Ist  jemand  prophetische Rede gegeben, so übe er sie dem Glauben
    gemäß.
    
    Römer 12,6