Have you looked into Soundex or Metaphone? I myself have not used them. I just saw them mentioned in PHP's function list and thought they might be useful some d

Have you looked into Soundex or Metaphone? I myself have not used them. I just saw them mentioned in PHP's function list and thought they might be useful some day. - https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.soundex.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.soundex.php - https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.metaphone.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.metaphone.php PostgreSQL has an extension, fuzzystrmatch, that uses the same algorithms: - https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/fuzzystrmatch.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/fuzzystrmatch.html But it warns that the functions "do not work well with multibyte encodings (such as UTF-8)." So maybe first translate any such characters to ASCII?