Searching names having diacritics

My language has diacritics, a lot of it. So as in other languages, it is common to omit some (or all) in informal mails, sms, etc. Simply because it takes more effort to type it. Or when expecting that your name would not render on the receiving device.

When searching for a string or typing a name, say “Jérôme” (or “Ondřej” or “Øistein”), in the To field and awaiting the suggestions, only some of the expected pop up. The other Jérômes will not show up as their names are without diacritics (part of the email address, laziness when putting in the address book, …).

To help us out, those speaking and writing difficult languages, lazy and not knowing where to find ß and Ř on a keyboard, the searches should not be sensitive to diacritics.

Hi @ondra and thanks for your message. We can certainly agree with this suggestion, while noting that some symbols can be diacritics in one language while simply a different letter in another.

For instance, you wouldn’t expect “øgle” (“lizard” in Norwegian) and “ogle” to produce the same search results. :wink:

– Geir

@Geir , I actually do expect that – that writing “Jerome” would return all the similar instances like “Jérôme” or “Jérome”, writing “ogle” would return “øgle”.

There certainly are cases where the words with and without diacritics will have different meanings. Nonetheless i would still prefer to have slightly more results with all the desired ones as a subgroup, instead of a smaller group lacking some of the desired ones.

Trying to remember how do other approach this facet of searching, it seems that most perform a diacritics insensitive search, returning the larger group.

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@Geir Just realized that FF started to include results with diacritics when searching on a page (ctrl+F) for a word without diacritics. So when searching for “ake” or “jerome”, FF will return all "Jan-Åke"s and "Jérôme"s on the page. Great addition! :wink: