Question

I have this function for getting users from database :

function get_users_limited($offset, $limit)
{
    $q = $this->db->select('*')
              ->from('users')
              ->join('user_profiles', 'user_profiles.user_id = users.id'  )
              ->order_by('users.username asc')
              ->limit($limit, $offset)
              ->get();
    return $q;
}

And I want to order the results by username asc, but the problem is that it makes difference between A and a and B and b etc.

The problem is that the result looks like this:

Albert
Bob
Caesar
axnGuy
blackboy83
c3p0

and I want this:

Albert
axnGuy
Bob
blackboy83
Caesar
c3p0

Any advice how to ingnore lowercase and uppercase in CodeIgniter?

I need CI specific solution!

Answer 1

I’m not familiar with your php there, and you don’t specify what charset you’re using. Also, it’s not specifically mentioned, but I assume we’re talking MySQL here.

Assuming MySQL, suppose you’re using a charset of utf8.

You can choose a different collation (valid for utf8) in your select such as

SELECT `name` COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci as `name` FROM `owners`;

Here the table is utf8 charset, and I use the utf8_unicode_ci (ci for case insensitive) collation mode on the name column.

If you were using the default charset of latin1 you’d do something more like:

SELECT `name` COLLATE latin1_general_ci as `name` FROM `owners`;

etc.

Totally unfamiliar with your PHP, but I’d assume it’d look something like this:

function get_users_limited($offset, $limit)
{
    $q = $this->db->select('users.username COLLATE latin1_general_ci as c1, user_profiles.* ')
              ->from('users')
              ->join('user_profiles', 'user_profiles.user_id = users.id'  )
              ->order_by('c1 asc')
              ->limit($limit, $offset)
              ->get();
    return $q;
}

Specifying the collation subset of your charset doesn’t set or change the default collation on that column/table.