How to make MySQL aware of multi-byte characters in LIKE and REGEXP?

Question

I have a MySQL table with two columns, both utf8_unicode_ci collated. It contains the following rows. Except for ASCII, the second field also contains Unicode codepoints like U+

Answer 1

I'm not dead-set on using MySQL

Postgres seems to handle it quite fine:

test=# select 'ˌˈʔ' like '___';
 ?column? 
----------
 t
(1 row)

test=# select 'ˌˈʔ' ~ '^.{3}$';
 ?column? 
----------
 t
(1 row)

If you go down that road, note that in Postgres' ilike operator matches that of MySQL's like. (In Postgres, like is case-sensitive.)

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For the MySQL-specific solution, you mind be able to work around by binding some user-defined function (maybe bind the ICU library?) into MySQL.