Laravel Eloquent Ignore Casing

Question

I am trying to run a query using Eloquent the $vars['language'] is in lower case but the language column is not necessarily in lower case. How can i do this search using eloquent but still have the lower case in the query

Item::where('language', $vars['language'])

What i want to do is this even though i can't find anywhere how to do this

Item::where('LOWER(language)', $vars['language'])

so that they are both in lowercase and then i can get them to match.

Answer 1

Use whereRaw with parameter binding to sanitize your whereRaw statement:

$term = strtolower($vars['language']);
Item::whereRaw('lower(language) like (?)',["%{$term}%"])->get();

Prev answer In some dabases you can use operator ilike in your where. For example

Item::where('language', 'ilike', $vars['language'])->get();

All available operators are:

protected $operators = array(
    '=', '<', '>', '<=', '>=', '<>', '!=',
    'like', 'not like', 'between', 'ilike',
    '&', '|', '^', '<<', '>>',
);

Edit: ilike is case-insensitive like.