MySQL collation

PHP MySQL searchin in database with a field having latin1_bin collation

I have a database table on a server where I can't change any configuration and one misconfiguration is the a mix og UTF-8, latin1_bin and latin1_swedish_ci. When searching the field having latin1_bin and it contains Swedish characters like ÅÄÖ it seemed hard to get it to work properly. However I found a soultion finally that worked for us.