SQL query that is insensitive towards non-latin characters?

Question

Is there any way I can write a select query with where clause, that ignores non-latin characters?

For example there is Lithuanian character Ė, obviously the equivalent in latin character would be E. So is there anyway I can write a query like this:

SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `keyword` LIKE %E%;

And I want it to return all records that contain any of these characters: E,Ė,Ę, is there any way I can achieve this automatically with SQL (or even in PHP level)?

Answer 1

You don't say what you've tried. You also don't say what character set (utf-8) and collation your table contains. Those are the ways you control those things by default.

You could try this:

 SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `keyword` COLLATE utf8_general_ci LIKE %E%

Or this

 SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `keyword` COLLATE utf8_lithuanian_ci LIKE %E%

I don't know if the second one will work for what you want, because I don't know Lithuanian. Are E, Ė, and Ę considered the same letter in the dictionary? If they are not, then the Lithuanian collation won't match them to each other.

If you do find that a particular collation works, you can alter your column to use that collation by default.

alter table `table`
  change `keyword` `keyword` collate utf8_lithuanian_ci

That's a good idea because then you have a chance of indexes speeding your search.