normalizing accented characters in MySQL queries

Question

I'd like to be able to do queries that normalize accented characters, so that for example:

é, è, and ê

are all treated as 'e', in queries using '=' and 'like'. I have a row with username field set to 'rené', and I'd like to be able to match on it with both 'rene' and 'rené'.

I'm attempting to do this with the 'collate' clause in MySQL 5.0.8. I get the following error:

mysql> select * from User where username = 'rené' collate utf8_general_ci;
ERROR 1253 (42000): COLLATION 'utf8_general_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1'

FWIW, my table was created with:

CREATE TABLE `User` (
  `id` bigint(19) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `username` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `uniqueUsername` (`username`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=56790 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

Answer 1

The reason for the error is not the table but the characterset of your input, i.e. the 'rené' in your query. The behaviour depends on the character_set_connection variable:

The character set used for literals that do not have a character set introducer and for number-to-string conversion.

Using the MySQL Client, change it using SET NAMES:

A SET NAMES 'charset_name' statement is equivalent to these three statements:

SET character_set_client = charset_name;
SET character_set_results = charset_name;
SET character_set_connection = charset_name;

(from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-connection.html)

Example output:

mysql> set names latin1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from User where username = 'rené' collate utf8_general_ci;
ERROR 1253 (42000): COLLATION 'utf8_general_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1'

mysql> set names utf8;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from User where username = 'rené' collate utf8_general_ci;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

Altenatively, use can explicitly set the character set using a 'character set introducer':

mysql> set names latin1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from User where username = _utf8'rené' collate utf8_general_ci;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

I know this question is pretty old but since Google led me here for a related question, I though it still deserves an answer :)