Creating queryable strings

I'd like to store strings also in a more queryable slug-like format to the database, forcing it to lowercase, replacing the accented letters with their latin counterparts (ä -> a, ö -> o, ç -> c etc.) and replacing other开发者_运维问答 special characters with e.g. dashes. Is there a standard for these kind of format? What would be preferable means to achieve it in Java?

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The database can do this for you through collations. Collations specify which characters in a specific character set can be considered equivalent with each other when compared.

Have a look at this for visual example of a collation:

http://www.collation-charts.org/mysql60/mysql604.utf8_general_ci.european.html

Here's a good description of how collations work from the MySQL manual:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-syntax.html

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This is the solution that I've found working best so far:

return Normalizer
    .normalize(src.trim().toLowerCase(Locale.ENGLISH),
        Normalizer.Form.NFD)
    .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "")
    .replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]+", "-")
    .replaceAll("[^a-z0-9]+", "-").replaceAll("(^-|-$)+", "");

This converts: ¿Qué? to que, Cool!!!!1 to cool-1 and åæø to a.