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Searching for special characters

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Searching for special characters
If someone searches for "gruyere" is there any way I can get the engine to return entries containing "gruyère"? And vice versa?

At the moment I've tried to make sure there are no accented characters in titles, and included the accented variation in the description, in an attempt to cover all eventualities. This is fine as far as it goes, but it's not ideal.

Any offers?

Jill
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Re: Searching for special characters In reply to
Dear Jill,

did you consider to replace all special characters by its representation in HTML (like ä to &auml Wink <- sorry, the BB replaces the semicolon and the closing bracket)? If not, then you need to replace these characters in your database and in the search requests. If you should need such a sub-routine then ask me. I know a script containing such a tool.

Best regards,

Rainer

[This message has been edited by Rainer (edited April 16, 1999).]

[This message has been edited by Rainer (edited April 16, 1999).]

[This message has been edited by Rainer (edited April 16, 1999).]
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Re: Searching for special characters In reply to
I think I know what you're getting at, but I'd still need some way of getting the search function to check for &eacute (ampersand + eacute) and &egrave (ampersand + egrave) every time it came across an "e". Which, when I think about it, seems like a lot of effort for the sake of a few isolated words.

Alternatively, is there a way of monitoring the search function to see whether one of a predetermined list of special terms has been entered, and then redirecting the search on that basis? For example, if someone entered "gruyere" it would trip a subroutine that did a search for "gruyere AND gruyère AND gruy&egravere".

This would also be a good way of dealing with common spelling mistakes. So, for example, anyone entering "spinich" would have their search redirected to "spinach". Is this possible? (I think this is a better question than the first one, actually! Wink

Jill


[This message has been edited by jill (edited April 16, 1999).]