Search function with Greek characters in MySQL

I have a search function for old Greek words (Wearch.nl).

The old greek words have mutch accents, ῦ is not the same as ὐ, but I want that if you type a "u" you get the results for ῦ and ὐ (and the other 5 variations). I am using the LIK开发者_开发技巧E function of MySQL to get the results.

I could search for all of them but I hope it can be shorter and faster.

If you are able to change the character set of your column (or table) then set it to utf8_general_ci (link to manual):

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8_general_ci;

With this character set (which is case insensitive, as denoted by _ci), accented characters have the same weight (the value used for collation), so they return true when compared with each other (link to manual):

Non-UCA collations have a one-to-one mapping from character code to weight. In MySQL, such collations are case insensitive and accent insensitive. utf8_general_ci is an example: 'a', 'A', 'À', and 'á' each have different character codes but all have a weight of 0x0041 and compare as equal.

mysql> SET NAMES 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT 'a' = 'A', 'a' = 'À', 'a' = 'á';
+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| 'a' = 'A' | 'a' = 'À' | 'a' = 'á' |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+
|         1 |         1 |         1 |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

Alternatively, or if you cannot alter the database configuration in this way, you could write a function to replace accented characters with their non-accented equivalents (i.e. é -> e) and write this into a dedicated search field (a full-text search field is recommended). Perform searches on this field and return the accented field to the application.