[Bug 744914] Re: transliterate text/use collation before adding to xapian db and when searching

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

This looks like a reasonable suggestion. Can you give an example of a
search that would produce better results if this was implemented? That
would help in prioritizing it.

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Title:
  transliterate text/use collation before adding to xapian db and when
  searching

Status in “software-center” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: software-center

  As of now software center uses str.lower() when searching in the
  xapian db:

  utils/query.py
  22:            s = search_term.lower()
  33:            query = xapian.Query(str_to_prefix[search_prefix]+search_term.lower())

  There are two problems with this:
  * many languages have diacritic marks for characters but for fast typing users usually write the base character: (in Romanian: ăâșțî and ĂÂȘȚÎ are spelled AASTI by some users).

  * characters in the Unicode set can appear in two forms: composed and
  decomposed:  the character U+00C7 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH
  CEDILLA) can also be expressed as the sequence U+0327 (COMBINING
  CEDILLA) U+0043 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C).

  To solve both problems both the text entered in the xapian db and the
  user's text query must be normalized.

  The search function in Chromium uses ICU rules to achieve this:
  - http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1100
  - http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#OAMlx_jo-ck/src/third_party/WebKit/Source/WebCore/editing/TextIterator.cpp&q=file:TextIterator.cpp&l=1882

  There is a python-icu library that could help achieve this. See for
  example http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/pyicu-
  dev/2010-October/000214.html

  Or one could just remove the diacritical marks from the string
  altogether: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/517923/what-is-the-
  best-way-to-remove-accents-in-a-python-unicode-string

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