match-against with ä to ae (and vice versa) conversion

[stefan]

hello all,

a project of mine needs to full-text search our database (short texts), and i see that "match-against" would fit it quite well (a like "%search%" would do it too).

the question is: the umlauts in german can also be written in a different manner, e.g. "ä" can also be written as "ae", and "ö" as "oe". when a user searches, and theres an umlaut in the query, it should find its substitution too. thats especially needed with names, where you often don't know if its an unlaut or its subsitution.

can i handle this with collations? when yes, how? when not, does anybody know an alternative or a nice workaround? (true, i could parse the search-string in the backend (php) and add the words in question to the string, but thats not so really elegant and at least it distorts the ranking of match-against).

thanks in advance,
stefan