EF Core Sqlite LIKE Unicode comparison

Question

We have a Windows.Net Core app using Sqlite and EF Core (latest) that deals with unicode data (non-ascii characters).

As the official Sqlite docs explain ( https://www.sqlite.org/matrix/quirks.html ) by default unicode case folding is not enabled. That means that eg the LIKE operator won't do case-insensitive comparison for non-ascii characters so "ä" will NOT equal "Ä".

The official docs also mention that it's possible to enable this LIKE case-insensitive comparison for unicode by using the ICU extension. I'm having a hard time finding a compiled version of it that's usable on Windows.

So I guess I have several questions:

1. Is there a compiled version of the ICU extension downloadable somewhere?
2. Is there an alternative way of achieving case-insensitive unicode LIKE? I found several potential options but they either didn't work (column collation, global collation etc) or seem clunky/slow (overriding the default LIKE operator and performing a LIKE in code)

Answer 1

ICU is a unicode/localization library and not a sqlite extension.

A list of available sqlite extensions can be found here https://www.sqlite.org/src/file/ext/misc , and none of them support unicode search.

In order to get unicode support, you likely will need to build sqlite yourself using the SQLITE_ENABLE_ICU compile parameter. Make sure that you have ICU installed beforehand so that you can reference and link it during the build process