how-to query mysql utf-8 table using ASCII

Question

I have created a mysql 5.6 table with a column encoded in utf-8, for characters in Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, French, German, Scandinavian language(s) - ie european characters, but quite non-ASCII.

However, i would like to query this column using just ASCII characters - eg in the LIKE clause- so that ă,î,â,ș,ț,ü,ä,ö etc. characters can be (succesfully) queried using a,e,i,o,u,s,t etc.

Is that even possible ?

Answer 1

Well, I don't see it possible by any conventional way using only SQL. You only can write query preprocessor, that will automatically replace ascii characters with european. https://php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php - assuming you are using PHP But you still need to feed every query to it.

Answer 2

I found a partial answer to my question:

If the character set you define for the column is utf8_general_ci , then many, (if not all) flavors of a,e,o,u will be found by a query using plain a,e,o,u . I even found the n in Wołoszyńska using plain n.

UNFORTUNATELY, the lowercase L "with oblique bar" in the same word was not found.

The answer was suggested by dddd's answer here

Answer 3

There is a cheat sheet for knowing what letters map "equal" under what collations in utf8 collations It agrees that Ł is not mapped to L for any collation. general_ci sorts it after Z ; utf8_unicode_520_ci sorts it with L ; the rest sort it before M .

polish_ci treats Ę as distinct from the rest of the E -like characters. Ditto for Ą . The Baltic states tend to keep certain accented consonants separate.

In polish_ci , Ń (hex C584 ) collates after N and before O ; the other collations treate it equal to N .

utf8_unicode_520_ci is probably the best collation for you.

Also, you might consider "combining" accents -- where two utf8 'characters' "combine" to make a single characters. utf8_unicode_ci collates 'correctly' for most of them, as seen here .