Function to remove accents in postgreSQL [duplicate]

Use the unaccent module that ships with PostgreSQL.

somedb=# CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;
CREATE EXTENSION
somedb=# SELECT unaccent('Hôtel');
 unaccent
----------
 Hotel

somedb=# SELECT * FROM table WHERE lower(unaccent(table.id)) = lower('Jose');

And speed things up a bit by generating an accentless, lower-cased index:

somedb=# CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY ON table (lower(unaccent(id)));