Matching international characters

å => a

[DrDoc]

What's the best way to match international letters such as ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆàáâãäåæÇçÐðÈÉÊËèéêë... etc in an SQL query? (PHP & MySQL)

For example, if the user enters "bla", I want it to match "blä", and vice versa. I mean, I could easily make a list of all common characters and just match them using REGEXP, but there must be an easier way.

PHP 4.2.3
MySQL 3.23.54

[DrDoc]

Maybe I should add that LIKE doesn't work...

E==e, but E<>é ...

[Fischerlaender]

The behaviour of MySQL also depends on the setting for the language. I've got an webspace account where MySQL is in its standard setting which is Swedish. This way a search for "ü" also shows me "y".

[DrDoc]

Can I change it so å, ä etc will match 'a', ü will match 'u', etc?

[DrDoc]

...and I'm looking for an SQL syntax that will work when included in the SELECT query...

[Fischerlaender]

My configuration:

character_set = latin1 
language = /usr/share/mysql/english/

I get the following result:

mysql> select 'é'='e'; 
+---------+ 
¦ 'é'='e' ¦ 
+---------+ 
¦  1  ¦ 
+---------+

This is the same for other combinations as well.

HTH! Stefan

[DrDoc]

How do I change that? I've been trying to find information both @ mysql.com and php.net, but nothing has been able to answer my question...

[Fischerlaender]

You can specify variables and especially the language settings in the my.cnf file of your MySQL server:
MySQL 4.1.2 `my.cnf' Option Files [mysql.com]

Maybe there is also an command for mysqladmin to do this change during runtime, but I don't that.

[DrDoc]

Thanks for the info!

See, the problem is that I don't have access to the configuration files. So, if there's a run-time option I'd prefer to know that...

Even though I think my hosting wouldn't mind making the change for me.