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

EDITED to incorporate fix to valid critisism

Use the HEX() function to render your bytes to hexadecimal and then use RLIKE on that, for example:

select * from mytable
where hex(ipa) rlike concat('(..)*', hex('needle'), '(..)*'); -- looking for 'needle' in haystack, but maintaining hex-pair alignment.

The odd unicode chars render consistently to their hex values, so you're searching over standard 0-9A-F chars.

This works for "normal" columns too, you just don't need it.

p.s. @Kieren's (valid) point addressed using rlike to enforce char pairs