-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi,
what is the best way to match german umlauts like 'ä' also their alternative writing 'ae'? For example I'm searching for "übersee" and I also want to find the word "uebersee" in the database. The "words" are actually names of persons. One possibility is to dynamically expand the SQL statement if such special characters are found. So the search term "übersee" will be expanded to "SELECT * FROM person WHERE name LIKE 'übersee%' AND name LIKE 'uebersee%'" but this is getting dirty and very very long if multiple umlauts are used to cover all cases ... So the other idea is to have the name twice in the database for every person and the second "version" of the name is a normalized for where all special characters are replaced with their alternative writing. E.g. I store the field name "übersee" and also name2 "uebersee" and when matching I match against name2. If the field would container more special characters it still would work without much more work, e.g. name is "überseemöbel" then name2 would be "ueberseemoebel" and when the term "überseemö" is entered it's also normalized to "ueberseemoe" and the LIKE statement will still match. Basically this is some kind of primitive stemming like lucene does it. Is there maybe some built-in support from MySQL for such special cases? thanks for any pointers, - - Markus -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFEIWDH1nS0RcInK9ARAkzyAKCyoPPVd1YRfhs1p/p8kY465/QPVQCfa5uj r2ZarPZvsJp5FPNDsdhAN7E= =5ADZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
