searching UTF-8 encoded text

[antony castle]

Hi, I'm trying to add a search search facility to a table containing data stored as UTF-8 encoded text. I need to be able to search the data in a way such that "foreign characters" are considered as their latin1 equivalents.

For example the string "řýchle" should be considered the same as the string "rychle". This is possible in php using the php function iconv() with the transliteration flag set.

Is there a similar function that can be used in mysql queries?

Any help with this would be very gratefully received!

Many thanks.