how can I return both accented and non-accented letters from a non-accented search string (and vice versa)

Question

hi there,

I've just read a few things about this but fail to understand.

Is there a simple way for me to query my database (it's a French/English dictionary)

and have search term: "mange" return both "mange" and "mangé"

there are many more examples with other accents so I was hoping for a very simple piece of code to say "look let's just ignore accents here and return everything"

is there such a thing as Accent Sensitivity ON/OFF ???

the dictionary is in isolated storage and I'm using a simple LINQ query with Contains(searchterm)

thanks for your help!

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cypripri

Answer 1

Hi,

You'll find interesting stuff here: Ignoring accented letters in string comparison

Cheers,
Christian H.

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The best is still to come ;)

Answer 2

What database are you using? In general letters with accents are stored as another letter inside the database entirely - it's not stored as e + ´ for example. I'd likely opt for using Regular Expressions where I replace the search string with a Regular Expression that matches for all variants - e.g.:

mange => mang[eéèê]

basically you replace every occurence of the letters that might have accents with a character class that matches all of the different versions.

SQLite supports Regular Expressions as described here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5071601/how-do-i-use-regex-in-a-sqlite-query

Answer 3

thanks a lot for the link which lead me to this particular post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7418624/linq-where-ignore-accentuation-and-case?lq=1 which is excatly what I need. thanks!

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cypripri

Answer 4

thanks it's a simple table in isolated storage of the WP8 app, I'm querying using LINQ and now found this post which looks like just the job. thanks for your help!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7418624/linq-where-ignore-accentuation-and-case?lq=1

 

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cypripri