Touch search question

Hi,

With a database loaded with North American city names, and clients in
Québec, I have run into a tough problem for me. Taking input from a
text box, I use a regex to clean out any non-essential characters like
the set of (.- ) dot, dash, space etc...

I then do an ilike comparison on the city names to find matches and
report back the results. Problem is, a lot of cities have accented
names like Montréal. And I find that while e and E are easily matched
when using ILIKE, é is not É, making ILIKE a useless help...

How would one better craft a search capable of finding entries when
accented characters come into play? Should I look at creating a
mapping of say é and É to just e?

Any thoughts on the best way to SELECT matches in this case most
appreciated!!

Dave