title: MySQL query to match similar words/sentences
body: <p>I have a table in a MySQL Database which has this structure:</p>
  
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE `papers` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `title` varchar(1000) COLLATE utf8_bin DEFAULT NULL,
  `booktitle` varchar(300) COLLATE utf8_bin DEFAULT NULL,
  `journal` varchar(300) COLLATE utf8_bin DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `title_fulltext` (`title`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `booktitle_fulltext` (`booktitle`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `journal_fulltext` (`journal`)
  ) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1601769 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now I know that in the column title, somewhere within the millions of rows, there is a row which contains the string</p>
  
  <pre><code>nFOIL: Integrating Naïve Bayes and FOIL.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to look for</p>
  
  <pre><code>my_string = "nFOIL: integrating Naïve Bayes and FOIL"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and find the right row. You see it has to be a case insensitive search and the dot at the end is missing in the query. How do I implement this?</p>
  
  <p>I tried</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT id FROM papers WHERE UPPER(title) LIKE %s
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and converted my_string to upper case in python and put a "%" at the end of my_string but this doesn't seam a good way of handling this. It did not work too. =)</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any suggestions!</p>