Question

In a php/mysql application where people can registre, is it a good idea to strtolower the username then store in the database in order to not have problems in the future? because people are using DiFfeReNt cases and i’m afraid that will make conflict in some queries.

Thanks

Answer 1

It really doesn’t matter – MySQL is case insensitive unless you specify so Andy, andy and AnDy will all match.

The caveat is collation – however:

The default character set and
collation are latin1 and
latin1_swedish_ci, so nonbinary string
comparisons are case insensitive by
default.

Beware, if you are using latin1_general_cs the cs stands for case sensitive, and all your queries will be case sensitive! Here’s some more info on charsets and collation.