MySQL search without any special characters
<p>I am wondering if it's possible to search through a MySQL field where the field may have something like this:</p>

<pre><code>test - hello
</code></pre>

<p>but you have in a string from a user</p>

<pre><code>test: hello
</code></pre>

<p>Obviously it's easy on PHP-side to strip the string of any special characters like that, but is it possible to search through MySQL rows and ignore special characters?</p>