Question

I’ve searched for a question for hours and I haven’t found an answer that was suitable for me, so… Here I come…

I’m Hungarian and we use the following accented characters in our language: áéíóöőúüű (and of course the capital counterparts)
I want to make a smart search in php where the user is allowed to enter a search word and it finds the result whether it has the accent or not and both in the MySQl table or the search field. So…

My MySQL table is using utf8_hungarian_ci
I can do the php conversion so that either the user types in ‘Bla’ or ‘blá’, it will return ‘bla’ and we are searching the mySQL database.

But my problem is… My database might have a ‘bla fér’ or a ‘bláter’ field entry. But if we search with ‘bla’ (from PHP) it only return ‘bla fer’. How can I convert the field I’M searching to make ‘bla fér’-> ‘bla fer’ and ‘bláter’ – > ‘blater’. So essentially…

I want to get rid of the accented characters and make them into unaccented ones. But of course, only for the sake of searching. Please help! Thank you!

EDIT:

<?php 
$search = $_GET["search"]; // May contain áéíóöőúüű
$accented= array("Ö","ö","Ü","ü","ű","Ó","ó","O","o","Ú","ú","Á","á","U","u","É","é","Í","í"," ","+","'","ő", "Ű", "Ő", "ä","Ä","ű","Ű","ő","Ő");
$nonaccented=array("O","o","U","u","u","O","o","O","o","U","u","A","a","U","u","E","e","I","i","_","_","_","o", "U", "O", "a","A","u","u","o","o");
$search = str_replace($accented,$nonaccented,$search);
$query = "SELECT id, name FROM people WHERE name LIKE '%$search%'"; // Database column 'name' may also contain áéíóöőúüű
?>

Answer 1

Here are some results from my tests. You can compare to yours:

CREATE TABLE `test` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `name` varchar(32) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=5 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

Table contents:

mysql> select * from test;
+----+---------+
| id | name    |
+----+---------+
|  1 | bla     | 
|  2 | blater  | 
|  3 | bláter | 
|  4 | bhei    | 
+----+---------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Search results;

mysql> select * from test where name like '%bla%';
+----+---------+
| id | name    |
+----+---------+
|  1 | bla     | 
|  2 | blater  | 
|  3 | bláter | 
+----+---------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Search with accent:

mysql> select * from test where name like '%blá%';;
+----+---------+
| id | name    |
+----+---------+
|  3 | bláter | 
+----+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I get the same results even with COLLATE=utf8_hungarian_ci