Mysql database collate with czech symbols

Question

I need to search some rows from database by its title. Problem is with czech diacritics: in phpMyAdmin in row title is shown this:

Černé kouřovody 2MM

in php, where I call searching query default string is written like this:

Černé kouřovody 2MM

And I don't know, how to find out rows with this ( Černé kouřovody 2MM ) title by this( ÄŒerné kouÅ™ovody 2MM ) title

Here is my query on database:

SELECT * FROM categories WHERE LOWER(title) LIKE LOWER("Černé kouřovody 2MM") COLLATE utf8_bin

Thank you very much for your help

Answer 1

There are multiple variants to solve this. Personally, I use base64 encoding . I encode it before insertion to db, and then I decode upon extraction from DB. You can avoid that by setting appropriate collation in your database, for example, czech collation.

If you use base64, you can use any character without worrying about collation, but it results in some data overhead. I'd use it.

Those 2 should be ok, cause I gotta run now :P