Unicode (hexadecimal) character literals in MySQL

Question

Is there a way to specify Unicode character literals in MySQL?

I want to replace a Unicode character with an Ascii character, something like the following:

Answer 1

The MySQL string syntax is specified here, as you can see, there is no provision for numeric escape sequences.

However, as you are embedding the SQL in PHP, you can compute the right bytes in PHP. Make sure the bytes you put into the SQL actually match your client character set.