Since regular expression is not supported by default SQLite, we can create a user function to do the job.

<?php

$db = new SQLite3("database.sqlit3", 0666);

// create a function named "preg_match"
// with the php core function "preg_match"
if ($db->createFunction("preg_match", "preg_match", 2) === FALSE)
  exit("Failed creating function\n");

// this query will then works as expected
$result = $db->query("SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE 
  preg_match('/^(apple|orange)$/', variable1)");

?>

In PHP 5.4 there will be a createCollation method to use your custom collation method, to be able to sort datasets using unicode, like this:

<?php
setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'fr_FR.UTF-8');
$db->createCollation('PHP_COLLATE', 'strcoll');

$db->query('SELECT * FROM my_table ORDER BY name COLLATE PHP_COLLATE;');
?>

But until this cool feature becomes available, you'll have to do some tricks, like this for french:

<?php
function sqlite3_to_ascii($str, $charset = 'UTF-8')
{
    // Don't process empty strings
    if (!trim($str))
        return $str;

    // We only process non-ascii strings
    if (preg_match('!^[[:ascii:]]+$!', $str))
        return $str;

    $str = htmlentities($str, ENT_NOQUOTES, $charset);

    $str = preg_replace('#&([A-za-z])(?:acute|cedil|circ|grave|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);#', '\1', $str);
    $str = preg_replace('#&([A-za-z]{2})(?:lig);#', '\1', $str);
    $str = preg_replace('#&[^;]+;#', '', $str);

    return $str;
}

$db->createFunction('to_ascii', 'sqlite3_to_ascii', 1);
$res = $db->query('SELECT * FROM test ORDER BY to_ascii(text);');
?>

This will convert non-ascii characters to ascii ones before collation. In fact this won't work with non-latin languages, but for latin-languages it's better than nothing.

Please note that this will slow down about 1.8 times the query (tested on a 10.000 rows table).