Discussion Forum

Stupid characters are a right pain :) I really want to revamp the card search query at somepoint, but it's just a case of getting around to it :[ There are some other iffy characters but I can't remember what they are at the mo, but agree, it would make searching hella easier :)

Cheers

Ian

Just get a Danish keyboard that completely fixes that problem.

Speaking as a Dane of course ;)

Touche :P My Pennsylvania-Dutch keyboard says some wonky things too, sometimes ;) Keeps trying to add an -en after every instance of "out" I type.

Their is a Dutch word named "outen" ?

A more serious and simple suggestion:
You could place an "Æ" just somewhere close to the search-field? That way people can simple ctr+c/ctr+v the Æ onto the search-field.
Or, a bit more advanced, a button which directly places an Æ in the search-field.

Again, as a Dane I don't know how big the hassle is, but this might be a simple way of helping out.

Anders

I will have a fiddle with this at the weekend. There has got to be a way to sort this out :)

Ian

I would look towards implementing another column in the table that holds the card names. This table would be sort of a searchable translation column. You would do a mass conversion using that translation logic. For example:

Æther Vial -> aethervial
Kemba's Legion -> kembaslegion

Then you would run that same translation on the search terms that the user entered. The translation logic can be anything you want, as long as it's consistant with the terms in the column. (For example, it might actually be a good idea to keep spaces, so that words like "basle" doesn't match "Kemba's Legion".)

Here's my suggested translation routine:

(Sorry, I think in Perl, so it's going to be a bunch of regular expressions. Left side removed for simplicity.)

lc($name);
trim($name);
s/[Ææ]/ae/g;
s/[\s_]+/ /g; # reduces spaces to 1 and translates tabs/underscores/etc.; does not remove spaces
s/[^\w\s]+//g; # removes non-word/space characters

You could also put that whole thing in a SoundEx routine for spelling correction. SoundEx requires only one input, and produces a single string for storage and comparsion with other SoundEx'd search terms. Be sure to SoundEx each word, and not the whole phrase. (In terms of spell checking, I'd prefer Levenshtein edit distance, but you would have to compare the search term with the card names dynamically, which would be CPU costly. Unless there is some sort of parallelized way that I haven't seen yet.)