Checking for existing records

Hello all, I'm looking for the sort of programming inspiration I suspect I won't find in manuals - I have checked the web first! When saving records to a table I generally do a fairly standard check to ensure that there is not already a record of the same name. I even put a big warning message on the page asking users to check to ensure that a record of a particular name doesn't already exist before they create a new record. But this hasn't stopped entries such as the following: Record x: "The Prince's Trust" Record y: "The Princes Trust" Record z: "the Prince's Trust" Two of these were entered as consecutive records by the same person! I know I won't be able to make any application entirely foolproof but are there any steps I could use within the combination of MySQL and PHP that might minimize such duplication? Thanks in advance, Michael Egan