Create accent insensitive search 1

[hardingd]

Hi everyone,
I would firstly like to say hello to everyone as this is my first time at tek-tips.com.
I'm making a dynamic popup of user names as the user is entering them. I was wondering if anyone had any tips for making an accent insensitive search using javascript.
Here's my setup:

for(i = 0; i < arrName.length; i++)
{
if([b]arrName[i].toLowerCase().indexOf(searchValue)[/b] == 0 && searchValue.length != 0)
{
	fillBox.innerHTML += '<div class="peopleSearch" >+ arrName[i] + '</div>';
results ++;
}
}

My issue is that if people don't enter the accented charater, they won't get the results that have accented characters such as ê and é.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks in advance,
HardingD

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

One way would be to store two copies of the names - one for searching on (plain text), and one for display purposes (with accents).

Hope this helps,
Dan



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[damber]

Another way (but possibly a little inefficient) would be to hold an array of the character codes that are related.. e.g. é É e E - you would probably create an associative array which stored each character or character code as the reference and the preferred basic character as the value... e.g.:

aChars['é'] = 'e';
aChars['e'] = 'e';
or
aChars['233'] = 'e';
etc

And then to pre-parse any text you want to compare using a function that replaces any 'exotic' char with it's basic equivalent - so café would become cafe etc etc.

There may be some built in method/parameter but if there is it escapes me at the moment.

A smile is worth a thousand kind words. So smile, it's easy!

 

[hardingd]

Hey guys,
Thanks for the response. I think I'm going to have to use a couple of arrays for this as damber suggested.
I don't think it will be that inefficient becuase it will only take two or three key presses to limit the result set to what the user wants.
Much appreciated.
HardingD.