php, mysql: compare strings - accent sensitive and case insensitive

[itsming]

i need to perform a name search in the database based on a set of keywords. the result should be accent sensitive and case insensitive.following the solution i found here plus few modifications to allow case insensitivity, i used the following code:\[code\]$sql = "SELECT name FROM table_names WHERE LOWER(name) LIKE _utf8 '%".strtolower($keyword)."%' COLLATE utf8_bin";\[/code\]this does not work for me when the search keyword contains accents. but the strange thing is that this query works well in phpMyAdmin (but i read somewhere that this shouldn't be reliable). what could be the problem here?UPDATE:i revised my code to:\[code\]$sql = "SELECT name FROM table_names WHERE LOWER(name) LIKE LOWER(_utf8 '%$keyword%') COLLATE utf8_bin";\[/code\]but i still have no results.thanks!