Problem with "multilingual" selects

[czerny]

<br>I have the following problem with select queries:<br><br>I have a MySQL database, which contains tables with Spanish names. They are spelled with Spanish special characters, like accented vocals and the &quot;n with tilde&quot;. Now I want to allow users to search in this database and actually get results even though they don't enter the names with accents or &quot;n with tilde&quot;. This is targeted especially to foreign users, who won't be able (because of their keyboards) or won't know how to spell the words with accents and tildes.<br><br>Until now, the only solution I have come up with is to duplicate the name columns (1 with accent and/or tilde, 1 without accent and/or tilde).<br><br>Is there a more elegant way to solve this problem? A fuzzy search ? (I have read about the soundex function, but I don't think this one will help me out).<br><br>Thank you very much for any hints.<br><br>Miguel (=Michael)<br><br>