For note, just unaccenting won’t find slight misspelling and similar phenomes and so forth. If you are using PostgreSQL (as stated above) then you really should use it’s language lookup system (tsvector’s and all). It is significantly more powerful, more useful, and will also be faster than using ILIKE.

Also, you really don’t want to accept user string when using ILIKE/LIKE as it is quite possible to craft some exponentially bad lookups via it that can bring your database to a crawl or death.

A quick no-index setup but significantly more useful and safe than ILIKE while returning much better results would be something like changing your example into:

    |> where(
      [a],
      fragment("to_tsvector(?) @@ to_tsquery(?)", a.lastname, ^search_string)
    )

And there are tons of options on how to control it as well, but the defaults are perfectly fine for 95% of cases.

Hello Max,

I am having trouble understanding your questions. Do you mean escaping? Do you want to escape the search string?

Could you provide us with a small example of what you are looking for?