I'm hoping this is a) caffeine-deprivation b) a misunderstanding of PHP multi-byte functions or c) a misunderstanding of passing stuff via ajax.

Site and database are UTF-8 encoded. I have a database of people's names and urls to their site bios. Let's say one of those names is Renée Zellweger. If I go into PHPMyAdmin I can find her db entry whether I search for "Renée" or "Renee" without the accent.

I have a page where I enter news articles in a textarea. I pass the textarea to another PHP script that searches the textarea for names in my database and replaces them with a Textile-formatted link.

Unlike the PHPMyAdmin search, the code appears not to be ignoring whether there are accents or not. If my textarea contains "Renée Zellweger" it will match to the "Renée Zellweger" in the database, but "Renee Zellweger" without accents in the textarea will not match the "Renée Zellweger" in the db.

Here's the jQuery that's triggered to pass the textarea to the database:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
$("#link-bios").on("click", function(e) {
 e.preventDefault();
 var textarea = $("#markItUp");
 var peopleid = "<?php echo $peopleid; ?>";
 var db_request = $.ajax({
 url: "/rather/linkcelebs.php",
 type: "POST",
 data: {
  textarea: textarea.val(),
  peopleid: peopleid
 },
 dataType: "json"
 });
 db_request.done(function(response) {
 textarea.val(response.text);
})
});
// -->
</script>

And here's the applicable part of the code from script it calls $name and $url are results from the database. So the $name from the db is the needle and the textarea is the haystack.

while ($stmt->fetch()) {
if (mb_stristr($_POST['textarea'], $name) == TRUE AND mb_stristr($_POST['textarea'], $url) == FALSE) {
$_POST['textarea'] = str_replace($name, "\"$name\":/cr/$url/", $_POST['textarea']);
 } 
 }

Is mb_stristr the wrong function to call if I want to ignore accents?

Many thanks for advice/insights.