Unicode to ASCII

Hi guys! I have a database in MySql, filled with texts written in ancient greek and now I want to sort them. The current character set is UTF-8. The problem with certain lanuages of the world (as in this case with ancient greek), is that they have some sort of diacritics on their vowels, which are supposed to change the accent. For example you can have the letter "a" with circumflex, or with acute, or with grave and so on. In the Unicode table all of these are represented as distinct characters in different positions of the character map. However, alphabetically they are the same letter "a" (or "e", or "o" etc). Moreover, their order in the Unicode table is not alphabetical. What this project needs to do, is to strip the diacritics in such a way, that the sorting engine can treat all "a"s as the first letter of the alphabet, all the "b"s as the second, and so on. The way I see this, is making a many to one "translation" table, so that for example all "a"s with diacritics are represent by the plain "a". This is not exactly a Unicode to ASCII project, but this was the only way I could think of describing it. Actually, I need it to be working with my UTF-8 data in the MySQL environment. ## Deliverables I forgot to mention, that the coder of this project will most probably have to cooperate with the person who has done the development of the database, so as to make both projects run smoothly together with each other. * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Thursday May 8, 2008 6:11:19 AM: Ok guys, I'm really sorry for the delay, but here we have Easter and I'm away from the office. Christ is risen! (This is not preaching, it's a greeting in my country...) About the project now: Many of you have asked me for the alphabetical order of the letters consisting the greek alphabet, so that they could check their coding ideas before giving me a final offer. I have started writing all greek characters together with their diacritics in an Excel document and now it is finally ready. In the beginning I was also putting a second column with the hex number that represents the place of each character in the unicode table, but then I thought this might not be neccessary to you. So, I'm sending you the .xls and if you still need me to complete the second column, we'l talk about it later.