How to achieve "accent-insensitive" searching

You'd heard of case-insensitive searching.  What about 
"accent-insensitive" searching?

I want to store text containing accented characters in the database (in 
tables with UTF-8 charset), but allow users to search (via a perl-backed 
web front-end) using both the accented characters and their 
corresponding unaccented characters where there are obvious correspondences.

For example, I want to be able to store "José", but allow users to find 
that by searching for either "José" or "Jose".

At the moment, all I can come up with is storing two columns in the 
table -- one holding the accented charcaters, and one holding the 
corresponding ASCII equivalent where possible.  So when somebody enters 
"José" into the database, "José" gets stored in a "name" column and 
"Jose" gets stored in a "asciiname" column.  Then, when users do a 
search, their search criteria is ASCII-ized by the same routine that 
produced the data to insert into the "asciiname" column and then a SQL 
query along the lines of  "SELECT ... FROM name, ... WHERE asciiname 
LIKE <ascii-ized search criteria>" can be performed.

Is there any better way to achieve this?  In particular, does the 
database have the means to do this kind of thing itself, rather than 
having to do it in the perl code?

- Steve


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Radan Computational Ltd.

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