Search mechanism to search for words both with/without special characters - how to?

How to make a search mechanism like that:

when user type: "sól" two words are searched: "sol" & "sól"

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and there are search results for both words

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You can use a mySQL collation that is "Umlaut insensitive", for example utf8_general_ci.

Either

• Create a specialized search column that is utf8_general_ci

• Or define the collation while searching, which is easier but less good for performance. This should work:

  select * from column where name='sól' COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
  

  However, doing this may degrade performance in some situations, because I'm quite sure the fulltext index can't be used when specifying the collation like this.