Re: How to achieve "accent-insensitive" searching

Steve Hay wrote:
> You'd heard of case-insensitive searching.  What about 
> "accent-insensitive" searching?


Hi Steve

No answers from here, I'm afraid, but it's an area that interests me, so
I'd love to hear how you do sort this out. Others must have solved this:
Google, for example, gives me similar (but not the same!?) results if I
search for "città" or "citta".

Since you're working with a web front end, I wonder if there's any
mileage in adapting the PHP approach below, that manipulates HTML
entities to zap accents. I know it doesn't get to the heart of your
problem on the database/SQL side, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

<quote>

In order to get rid of accents, we don't need to reach as far out as the
ascii tables. HTML has the lovely property that accents are added to the
character X in the form &Xmodif; where modif stands for the modification
of the original character: acute, grave, uml, etc.
There are far fewer accents than accented letters so this should do the
trick whether or not it is intended for HTML or not:

function replace_accents($in_string)
{
   $out_string = htmlentities($in_string);

   $out_string = str_replace("uml;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("acute;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("grave;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("cedil;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("ring;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("circ;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("tilde;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("lig;", "", $out_string);
   $out_string = str_replace("slash;", "", $out_string);

   $out_string = str_replace("&", "", $out_string);
   return $out_string;
}

The function above assumes there are only letter in the input (no
ampersand, < and >, quotes, etc).

[ from: http://php.selwerd.nl/manual/fr/function.str-replace.php ]

</quote>


Regards

Richard

P.S. I was also fascinated by this interesting article on related
problems of alphabetization: http://www.rostra.dk/alphabet/alpha_en.htm


-- 
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\ Richard M Davis
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