update: for particular purposes consider using Collator class, it makes collation keys (byte arrays) out of strings applying locale, case sensitiveness and unicode decomposition. (at least so says the doc, http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/Colla... )
http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/Norma...
update: for particular purposes consider using Collator class, it makes collation keys (byte arrays) out of strings applying locale, case sensitiveness and unicode decomposition. (at least so says the doc, http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/Colla... )