Re: Searching with accented words

[Rick James]

Did you execute SET NAMES utf8 from PHP after connecting? Perhaps the data is not actually in utf8.

Do
SELECT field, hex(field), length(field), char_length(field)
FROM books WHERE id=...;
Spanish accented letters should take 2 bytes. If they are taking 4 bytes, then you hit the "double encoding" problem. This will be tricky to fix.

Suggest looking into utf8_spanish_ci collation; it will probably be more "correct" for Spanish author titles and authors (but less correct for non-Spanish). (This has no impact on your LIKE/MATCH question.)

Also please provide
* SHOW CREATE TABLE tbl\G
* SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'tbl'\G
* EXPLAIN SELECT ...\G
and surround them with [ code ] and [ / code ]
There may be some more clues there.