Accentuated and non-English letters

This WebDNA talk-list message is from

2002


It keeps the original formatting.
numero = 44939
interpreted = N
texte = Here's a problem that's been bothering me for a while:As most of you probably know, ascii was invented by a couple of second class yankee computer would-be-experts late one night over the sixth round of beer at their local strip joint. Over the years various people have attempted to sort out the mess those guys made - usually ending up making matters even worse :-(Does anybody know of a simple and - above all - reliable way to use letters like é, ø, ß etc. etc. in WebCat searches?I've tried every [CONVERTCHARS]-trick I can think of and still haven't found a solution I can trust.---What I'm actually working on is a (mainly classical) music search engine (there's a beta version at http://www.musicaviva.com/search/index.tpl ) in case anybody are interested. If somebody searches for - say Händel, the server receives the ä as any of a number of ascii codes depending on the visitor's OS, his/her browser, the computers the request has been routed through and probably the moon phase and the average mid-day temperature in Kuala Lumpur the previous month. Of course, some people are either smart enough, stupid enough or ignorant enough to search for handel instead, but I can't actually *ask* people to do so. After all, I'd like the site to appear to be professional.It seems to me the only solution would be some kind of fuzzy search with wildcard characters (of course taking into account that some of these problematic letters are sometimes replaced with *two* letters from the reduced ascii character set...), but apparently WebCatalog doesn't support wildcards and the only thing fuzzy around here right now, is my head.Any suggestions?Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com ------------------------------------------------------------- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list . To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to Web Archive of this list is at: http://search.smithmicro.com/ Associated Messages, from the most recent to the oldest:

    
  1. Re: Accentuated and non-English letters (Tom Duke 2002)
  2. Re: Accentuated and non-English letters (Kenneth Grome 2002)
  3. Re: Accentuated and non-English letters (Frank Nordberg 2002)
  4. Re: Accentuated and non-English letters (Nitai @ ComputerOil 2002)
  5. Re: Accentuated and non-English letters (John Peacock 2002)
  6. Accentuated and non-English letters (Frank Nordberg 2002)
Here's a problem that's been bothering me for a while:As most of you probably know, ascii was invented by a couple of second class yankee computer would-be-experts late one night over the sixth round of beer at their local strip joint. Over the years various people have attempted to sort out the mess those guys made - usually ending up making matters even worse :-(Does anybody know of a simple and - above all - reliable way to use letters like é, ø, ß etc. etc. in WebCat searches?I've tried every [convertchars]-trick I can think of and still haven't found a solution I can trust.---What I'm actually working on is a (mainly classical) music search engine (there's a beta version at http://www.musicaviva.com/search/index.tpl ) in case anybody are interested. If somebody searches for - say Händel, the server receives the ä as any of a number of ascii codes depending on the visitor's OS, his/her browser, the computers the request has been routed through and probably the moon phase and the average mid-day temperature in Kuala Lumpur the previous month. Of course, some people are either smart enough, stupid enough or ignorant enough to search for handel instead, but I can't actually *ask* people to do so. After all, I'd like the site to appear to be professional.It seems to me the only solution would be some kind of fuzzy search with wildcard characters (of course taking into account that some of these problematic letters are sometimes replaced with *two* letters from the reduced ascii character set...), but apparently WebCatalog doesn't support wildcards and the only thing fuzzy around here right now, is my head.Any suggestions?Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com ------------------------------------------------------------- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list . To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to Web Archive of this list is at: http://search.smithmicro.com/ Frank Nordberg

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