RE: [PHP] order by what?

[snip]
> [snip]
> How can order by be forced to order alphabetically and ignore accents
> without stripping the accents for printout? This is a problem for both
> caps & normal letters.
> [/snip]
>
> Definitely an SQL question. What character set are you using in your
> database? Is the accent the first character of the string or is this a
> multi-byte character? 
>   
utf8 general
the accents are French - including first character and others in the
words...
e.g. Érable comes up before Autres; and Céréales appears before Café...
I imagine it's a collation (character set) problem. I don't know what to
use to eliminate this problem. Should the collation be latin1 swedish_ci
? I have never received a definitive response even on this list. :-(
And this is an ever recurring problem as I work with several languages
which all have accents...
[/snip]

Have you considered asking on the list of the database of your choice? Like the MySQL list?