This Perl Beginner would appreciate advice on how to tackle this problem ...

I need to sort lists of strings -- alphabetically, but insensitive to case or the presence of diacritics. For example, characters e E é É ê Ê è should be considered equivalent. I have a temporary sort function which I consider a monstrous hack -- it converts the diacritic characters to their non-diacritic equivalent, then lower-casing before performing the cmp comparison. It works, but it's inefficient and non-scaleable. There must be a better way -- anyone know what it is?

Background:

• The characters are all standard 8-bit Latin-1 ISO 8859-1 (no Unicode).
• The diacritics are those used in European languages: French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, etc.
• The strings are the values of a large hash, presently about 15,000 but expected to grow to at least 100,000.
• I use DB_File to store the hash - it is always tied.
• I need to use the same sort function in other contexts -- the problem is about how to compare strings rather than how to sort a hash by value.

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