Hands on: Foreign characters

My first instinct is to say, “Stick it all in a proper database.” MySQL can take the data and foreign characters, and PHP can manage the translations to and from HTML entities.

But what about the searching? There are ‘soundex’ functions in both PHP and MySQL that will help with finding words that sound similar, but tools such as that tend to be based on English pronunciation. So, if any readers have a solution, I’d love to hear from you. How can you ensure that all the people in Zurich can be found, however the search term is spelt? And how would you deal with spellings as different as Cologne and Köln?

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