title: MySQL string comparison with special characters
body: <p>I have created an autocomplete that matches against a list of names in a database.</p>
  
  <p>The database that I'm working contains a ton of names with special characters, but the end users are most likely going to search with the English equivalent of those names, e.g. <code>Bela Bartok</code> for <code>Béla Bartók</code> and <code>Dvorak</code> for <code>Dvořák</code>, etc. Currently, doing the English searches returns no results.</p>
  
  <p>I have come across threads saying that the way to solve this is to change your MySQL collation to utf8 (which I have done to no avail). </p>
  
  <p>I think that this may be because I used <code>utf8_unicode_ci</code>, but the one that would get the results that I want is <code>utf8_general_ci</code>. The problem with the latter though is that all the comments say to no longer use it.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know how I can solve this problem?</p>