mysql query with regex unicode

Question

I would like to make a mysql query to catch : أرأء

this char أ may be typed like: ( أ or إ or ا or

Answer 1

The utf8 for those 4 variants of Alef are D8A3 D8A5 D8A7 D8A2. So,

WHERE HEX(title) REGEXP '^(..)*D8(A3|A5|A7|A2)'

will check for the presence of any of them.

The ^(..)* matches any number of pairs of characters (hex, in this case) at the beginning of title, then look for any of those 2-byte utf8 codes.

This might be what you are striving for:

$SQL=" select * from work
    where HEX(title)
        REGEX '^(..)*D8(A2|A3|A5|A7)D8B1D8(A2|A3|A5|A7)D8A1';

^(..)* is to skip over an even number of hex characters (to keep aligned).
D8(A2|A3|A5|A7) is the utf8 encoding for the 4 Alefs.
D8B1 is for Reh.