How do I convert a column to ASCII on the fly without saving to check for matches with an external ASCII string?

Question

I have a member search function where you can give parts of names and the return should be all members having at least one of username, firstname or lastname matching that i

Answer 1

First off, it should work this way:

SELECT * FROM `test` WHERE `name` COLLATE utf8_general_ci LIKE '%renee%';

Where the test table is:

+-----+--------+
| id  | name   |
+-----+--------+
|  1  | Renée  |
|  2  | Renêe  |
|  3  | Renee  |
+-----+--------+

What is your MySQL version, and how do you try to match things?

---

One of the other possible solutions is transliteration.

Related: PHP Transliteration

Transliterating the input should not be a problem, but transliterating the values from the permanent storage (e.g. db) real-time during the search may not be feasible. So you can add three more fields like: username_slug, firstname_slug and lastname_slug. When inserting/modifying a record, set the slug values appropriately. And when searching, search the transliterated input against that slug fields.

+------+----------+---------------+----------+---------------+ ...
| id   | username | username_slug | lastname | lastname_slug | ...
+------+----------+---------------+----------+---------------+ ...
|    1 | Renée    |    renee      | La Niña  | la-nina       | ...
|    2 | Renêe    |    renee      | ...      | ...           | ...
|    3 | Renee    |    renee      | ...      | ...           | ...
+------+----------+---------------+----------+---------------+ ...

A search for "renee" or "renèe" would match all of the records.

As a side effect, you may be able to use that fields for generating SEF (search engine friendly) links, hence they are named ,..._slug, e.g. example.com/users/renee. Of course, in that case you should check for the uniqueness of the slug field.