Question

I want to get the contents from a row in the database and compare the lowercase version of it to a lowercase version of a user imput to check if it exists in the database:

"SELECT `id` FROM `user_accounts` WHERE `username` = '".strtolower($username)."'"

How can i get username to be lowercase from mysql?

Answer 1

If you really want case to not matter then you should set the collation of the column to be case-insensitive.

mysql> SET NAMES 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_unicode_ci';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> SELECT 'foobar' = 'FoObAr';
+---------------------+
| 'foobar' = 'FoObAr' |
+---------------------+
|                   1 |
+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> SELECT 'fOoBaR' = 'FoObAr';
+---------------------+
| 'fOoBaR' = 'FoObAr' |
+---------------------+
|                   1 |
+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT 'fOoBaR' = 'FoObAz';
+---------------------+
| 'fOoBaR' = 'FoObAz' |
+---------------------+
|                   0 |
+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)