Accent-insensitive string compare in MySQL 3.23?

[Dan Bradley]

Is it possible in MySQL 3.23 to do an accent-insensitive string comparison? In general what I'm looking for is something like:

select 'U' like 'Ü' = 1

It looks like, if you have your character sets configured correctly, that this would work in 4.1 (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Can it be done somehow in the 3 series?

Specifically I have an application where a user enters search parameters and is not likely to enter accented characters, but will wish to get matches for accented text as well. If he or she enters a seach string of 'foo', the expectation is that records matching 'føø' will be returned if they exist.

I know I could do the comparison at the application level, but this would be complicated and slow. I'm hoping for a solution where the database can handle that work. Upgrading to 4.1 could be an option of last resort, if that's the only way around the problem.

Thank you very much.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/14/2005 06:36PM by Dan Bradley.