full-text indexing, locales, triggers, SPI & more fun

I've been doing some poking at the full-text indexing code in
/contrib/fulltextindex to try to get it to work with non-ASCII locales
(among other things), but I'm having a bit of trouble trying to figure
out how to properly parse non-ASCII strings from inside the fti()
trigger function (which is written in C).

My problem is this:

I want to aggregate text in multiple languages in a single full-text index
much like the current structure used by the current fti() function. In order
to correctly parse the strings, however, I've got to know what locale
they're written in/for (otherwise, isalpha() thinks that characters such as
the Hungarian letter u" -- that's a 'u' with a double acute accent -- aren't
very alphabetic.)

My initial thinking (which could certainly be very wrong) is that the
easiest way to get around this would be to allow client apps to set their
LC_ALL environment variables, and then to have the new fti() function use
that locale while doing string manipulation.

But the way I'm doing things, it doesn't appear that the LC_ALL environment
variable is available. (Maybe it was never meant to be ... but I'm not a
very skilled C programmer, and I don't know the first thing about the SPI
interface, so please forgive me if I'm asking why the sun doesn't rise in
the west more often ;-)).

Here's what's happening:

bash# LC_ALL=hu_HU
bash# export LC_ALL
bash# psql test
Welcome to psql, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

Type: \copyright for distribution terms
\h for help with SQL commands
\? for help on internal slash commands
\g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
\q to quit

test=# INSERT INTO ttxt (t1) values ('FELEL�SS�G�');
INSERT 513377 1
test=#select * from ttxt_fti;
string | id
--------+--------
felel | 513377
ss | 513377
(2 rows)

Which isn't quite what I'm looking for ;-).

Inside the C source of fti(), I added a call to getenv("LC_ALL") to make
sure that LC_ALL really isn't set:

locale = getenv("LC_ALL");
elog(NOTICE,"Locale is '%s'\n",locale);

And sure enough, it outputs:

NOTICE: Locale is '(null)'

If, on the other hand, I do:

setlocale("LC_ALL","hu_HU")

inside fti(), everything works out perfectly:

test=# INSERT INTO ttxt (t1) values ('FELEL�SS�G�');
INSERT 513410 1
test=# select * from ttxt_fti;
string | id
-------------+--------
felel�ss�g� | 513410
(1 row)

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Charlie

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