specific collation issue

[Christian Roy]

Hi

I work on a project in egyptology where I must sort strings in a manner which does not seem available in standard mysql :

Translation of a hieroglyphic texte goes thru an intermediary step named "transliteration" where text is represented by "usual" characters which may be :
- either characters available in the unicode standard (for instance 'ꜣ' Latin small letter egyptological alef Unicode A723)
- or equivalent standard latin characters (for instance 'A' for 'ꜣ')

Existing collating sequences are not convenient for the two following reasons :
- unicode characters are not sorted in egyptological usual rder
- latin and unicode caracters coexistence.

My database contains a VARCHAR column with strings coded as described above.

To sort this column, ideal solution should be a user defined collating sequence : unfortunatly this is not supported by my hosting service.

Another solution is to add to the database a 'twin' column with the string "transcoded" with latin characters leading to the appropriaye collating sequence. This works but raises maintenance issues.

Any other idea ?

Thanks in advance.