How to ignore accentuated characters in HTML5 Madcap search

[MAF]

Hi everybody,

I am trying to find a way to ignore accents in the Madcap search. For example, if you search for "cliche", or "fiance" or "deja-vu" it will NOT find pages containing "cliché", "fiancé" or "déjà-vu". Does anybody know how to tell the Madcap search to ignore accents in the same way it ignores capital letters?

(using google search or elasticsearch is not an option in my case)

Many thanx from France

[Feebeegeebee]

Hi MAF,
I would try using synonyms to solve this.
(If you don't already use synonyms, right-click to create a synonyms file within the Project Organizer, under Advanced.)
You can set up an individual synonym, for example:
deja=déjà
Or maybe, even better, in your synonyms file, you could set up a Group that covers all alternatives:
déjà=deja=déja=dejà
Then, if someone fails to type any accented character, the search should still return the correct results.
Just did a quick test on a project and it works for me.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Feebeegeebee

[MAF]

Hi Feebeegeebee and many thanks for your response,

I do use synonyms for other things and yes it works fine but it is not a solution to the problem for the following reasons:

• When using synonyms the search does not Hhighlight the searched string in the result page, and this is a problem if you have topics with a lot of content or if you have drop downs in your topics
• Synonyms are ok for a few words but if you write content in a language with diacritics, you need to input all accentuated words of the dictionary.. And that can be a lot of words!

I am writing in French but I am guessing all languages with diacritics and ligatures will have the same problem. I have reported the problem to the Flare dev team but if in the meanwhile somebody has an idea on how to tweak the MC search to ignore accents, that would be great. Also, I would be interested to know if other writers in foreign languages have the same problem.

Regards

[MAF]

For info, this issue has been submitted as a bug and should be fixed in a future update to Flare.

Regards

Marc