Incorrect sort/collation/order with spaces in Postgresql 9.4

Question

I\'m using Postgresql 9.4.5. When I go to psql and run \\l I get

Encoding is UTF8
Collate is en_US.UTF-8 
cCtype is en_US.UTF-8

Answer 1

On Unix/Linux SE, a friendly expert explained that what you see is the proper way to sort Unicode. Basically, the standard is trying to sort:

di Silva Fred                  di Silva Fred
di Silva John                  diSilva Fred
diSilva Fred                   disílva Fred
diSilva John         ->        di Silva John
disílva Fred                   diSilva John
disílva John                   disílva John

Now if spaces were as important as letters, the sort could not separate the various identical spellings of Fred and John. So what happens is that it first sorts without spaces. Then in a second pass, strings that are the same without whitespace are sorted. (This is a simplification, the real algorithm looks fairly complex, assigning whitespace, accents and non-printable characters various levels of precedence.)

You can bypass the Unicode collation by setting:

export LC_ALL=C

Or in Postgres by casting to byte array for sorting:

order by name::bytea

Or (from Kiln's answer) by specifying the C collation:

order by name collate "C"

Or by altering the default collation for the column:

alter table products alter column name type text collate "C";