Question

I’m having a difficult time sorting a char field in MySQL. The problem is that accented characters get mixed up with un-accented characters. For example:

Abc
Ábd
Acc

I thought it may have something to do with collation. So I changed the collation of my table to utf8-ut8_bin, after reading this post. Actually, I altered the table several times to various collations. No cigar.

I should also add that, I don’t mind the order of the sort as long as the sort doesn’t result in a mixed list. In other words, this is fine:

Ábd
Abc
Acc

and so is this:

Abc
Acc
Ábd

Looking forward to your response.

Answer 1

You just need to use a case-sensitive collation, for example: utf8_general_cs.

UPD

I am sorry, it seems there is no utf8_general_cs, utf8_bin should work though.

And you should change the collation of the specific field instead of that of the table (or be sure that the field does use the table defaults).

mysql> SELECT * FROM (
    -> SELECT 'A' as l
    -> UNION ALL
    -> SELECT 'á' as l
    -> UNION ALL
    -> SELECT 'A' as l) ls
    -> ORDER BY l;
+----+
| l  |
+----+
| A  |
| á  |
| A  |
+----+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM (
    -> SELECT 'A' as l
    -> UNION ALL
    -> SELECT 'á' as l
    -> UNION ALL
    -> SELECT 'A' as l) ls
    -> ORDER BY l COLLATE utf8_bin;
+----+
| l  |
+----+
| A  |
| A  |
| á  |
+----+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)