Yes, this is standard behaviour in the non-language-specific unicode collations.
9.1.13.1. Unicode Character Sets
To further illustrate, the following equalities hold in both utf8_general_ci and utf8_unicode_ci (for the effect this has in comparisons or when doing searches, see Section 9.1.7.7, “Examples of the Effect of Collation”):
Ä = A
Ö = O
Ü = U
See also Examples of the effect of collation
You need to either
-
use a collation that doesn’t have this “feature” (namely
utf8_bin, but that has other consequences) -
use a different collation for the query only. This should work:
select * from topics where name="Harligt" COLLATE utf8_bin;
it becomes more difficult if you want to do a case insensitive LIKE but not have the Ä = A umlaut conversion. I know no mySQL collation that is case insensitive and does not do this kind of implicit umlaut conversion. If anybody knows one, I’d be interested to hear about it.
Related:
- Looking for case insensitive MySQL collation where “a” != “ä”
- MYSQL case sensitive search for utf8_bin field