title: normalizing accented characters in MySQL queries
body: <p>I'd like to be able to do queries that normalize accented characters, so that for example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>é, è, and ê
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>are all treated as 'e', in queries using '=' and 'like'.  I have a row with username field set to '<strong>rené</strong>', and I'd like to be able to match on it with both '<strong>rene</strong>' and '<strong>rené</strong>'.</p>
  
  <p>I'm attempting to do this with the 'collate' clause in MySQL 5.0.8.  I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>mysql&gt; select * from User where username = 'rené' collate utf8_general_ci;
  ERROR 1253 (42000): COLLATION 'utf8_general_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>FWIW, my table was created with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE `User` (
    `id` bigint(19) NOT NULL auto_increment,
    `username` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
    UNIQUE KEY `uniqueUsername` (`username`)
  ) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=56790 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8
  </code></pre>