Question

How I can use LOCATE ignoring accents on comparison? For instance:

SELECT LOCATE('a', 'João'); -- Fail
>> Currently: 0
>> Need:      3

SELECT LOCATE('ã', 'João'); -- Ok
>> Currently: 3
>> Need:      3

How I can do that? I can’t use LIKE on this case (and it works!).

Answer 1

If you use the latin1 charset, some accents will be ignored. This can have unexpected behaviour on some inputs however, so be sure to test thoroughly.

SET character_set_connection='latin1';
SELECT LOCATE('a', 'João');