MySQL lowercase to compare data

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

As answered above, Ideally this should work,

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

but it won't work if the "username" column in "user_accounts" table is defined as VARBINARY. The reason is VARBINARY requires the data to be case sensitive