MySQL diacritic insensitive search (spanish accents)

Question

I have a MySQL database with words containing accents in Spanish (áéíóú). I\'d like to know if there\'s any way to do a diacritic insensitive search. For instance, if I sear

Answer 1

You can force the column name to convert as UTF8. I haven't tried is for Spanish but rather for Romanian characters with accents, but I assume it's the same thing.

The query I use is:

SELECT CONVERT('gîgă' USING utf8) LIKE '%giga%'

Or in the more likely case of looking up a column in a table, you can use:

SELECT CONVERT(column_name USING utf8) FROM table_name LIKE '%giga%'