Best way to handle apostrophes when searching a MYSQL database

Question

I am currently using

MATCH column_name AGAINST ( 'search_term' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE);

where column_name is full text indexed. This works for the majority of cases but if the user searches for "items" I would like it to return both "short string items" AND "short string item's" from the DB (assuming both exist). Currently the way it is searching it treats the apostrophe as a letter rather than a word break such as a space. I saw some suggestions that I create another column of basically search friendly terms, in which case I could strip out the apostrophes but I was wondering if there was a better way, such as adjusting the collation to treat the apostrophe differently?

Answer 1

The solution that I ended up implementing first searches the fulltext indexed column in natural language mode and then also searches the column with a REPLACE and LIKE search:

SELECT
    *
FROM
    table
WHERE
    MATCH column_name AGAINST ("search_term" IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE)
    OR REPLACE (column_name, "'", "") LIKE "%search_term%";

This seems to return the proper results I am looking for.

For example if user searches for "items" , "item's" , "string items" , or "string items" it should return both "short string item's" and "short string items" (again assuming the exist in the DB).