Re: What am I missing when dealing with foreign chars?

[Rick James]

That depends.

mysql> SHOW COLLATION LIKE 'utf8%';
+--------------------+---------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
| Collation          | Charset | Id  | Default | Compiled | Sortlen |
+--------------------+---------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
| utf8_general_ci    | utf8    |  33 | Yes     | Yes      |       1 |
| utf8_bin           | utf8    |  83 |         | Yes      |       1 |
| utf8_unicode_ci    | utf8    | 192 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_icelandic_ci  | utf8    | 193 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_latvian_ci    | utf8    | 194 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_romanian_ci   | utf8    | 195 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_slovenian_ci  | utf8    | 196 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_polish_ci     | utf8    | 197 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_estonian_ci   | utf8    | 198 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_spanish_ci    | utf8    | 199 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_swedish_ci    | utf8    | 200 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_turkish_ci    | utf8    | 201 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_czech_ci      | utf8    | 202 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_danish_ci     | utf8    | 203 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_lithuanian_ci | utf8    | 204 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_slovak_ci     | utf8    | 205 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_spanish2_ci   | utf8    | 206 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_roman_ci      | utf8    | 207 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_persian_ci    | utf8    | 208 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_esperanto_ci  | utf8    | 209 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_hungarian_ci  | utf8    | 210 |         | Yes      |       8 |
+--------------------+---------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
(Do that on your machine; the list may be different.)
_ci means "case insensitive", which (unfortunately) includes "accent insensitive".  That is 'n' and 'tilde-n' are considered equal under utf8_%_ci.

WHERE ... COLLATE utf8_bin
will treat the two characters different.  But it will also tread 'N' and 'n' as different.

Is that Spanish?  If you are dealing only with Spanish, you could experiment with these
mysql> SHOW COLLATION LIKE '%span%';
+-------------------+---------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
| Collation         | Charset | Id  | Default | Compiled | Sortlen |
+-------------------+---------+-----+---------+----------+---------+
| latin1_spanish_ci | latin1  |  94 |         | Yes      |       1 |
| utf8_spanish_ci   | utf8    | 199 |         | Yes      |       8 |
| utf8_spanish2_ci  | utf8    | 206 |         | Yes      |       8 |
+-------------------+---------+-----+---------+----------+---------+



Please post any results you get.