Search engine with support of accents or not

Question

User1456405545 posted

Hi,

I have to make a search engine who search in a MySQL database in a "Name" column.

The problem is that my "Name" column contains entries with accents (I am French).

I want that if someone searches the name "Nestlé", the function searches for the words "Nestlé" but also "Nestle", "nestle" ... the case should not be a problem.

For now, the only solution found is to have a column "Tags", same as "Name" but without the accents. With over 12,000 entries, the duplicate column is problematic for space and redundancy handling.

My first idea was to change the search entry for it ignores accents but I do not see how.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

User-633481390 posted

Perhaps this Stackoverflow post would help - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7126527/problem-with-accent-insensitive-searches

Answer 2

User1456405545 posted

Thanks, I will search in this direction tomorrow at work, I don't remember in what collation my DB is for now.

EDIT : The collation utf8_general_ci can search with or without accents. Thanks a lot