Comment by layman51
3 days ago
When I do a Ctrl+F search for “Gonatano” one of the search results is the actual name as typed with the circumflex. I think that is kind of a handy feature of the browser I’m using but at the same time it is sort of weird since it technically is not the same name without the circumflex, right?
Also not all database systems would think the non-circumflex version is equivalent to the circumflex version. Does anyone have thoughts or ideas about how or why they should be treated equivalently?
I also recognize this can get kind of political. There was a push in California recently to let people have accented letters in their name. Apparently it is legally not allowed. And yet some people claim their California birth certificate does contain accented letters.
Postgres has a module called unaccent[0] that removes diacritics for filtering. I expect your browser is doing something similar. While not appropriate when looking for exact matches, when doing user-input based searches, this should probably be the norm, as the user may be unaware of the accents or how to input them correctly on their keyboards.
Dove deep on this years ago when implementing a filter for wines and wine regions.
[0][https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/unaccent.html]
> but at the same time it is sort of weird since it technically is not the same name without the circumflex, right?
Assuming you have a "standard" keyboard, it's not weird at all for your browser to match the diacritic when you type the non-diacritic character since presumably the diacritic would be difficult to type. Firefox's search feature even has a [_] Match Diacritics checkbox which you can enable or disable.
This is absolutely the desired default behaviour for ctrl+F in a browser. e.g. I frequently read French, and don't normally want to have to put in accents in my search term when I'm searching text for a word containing an accent.
Firefox has a "Match Diacritics" checkbox right next to the "Match Case" box when you ctrl+F so you can configure as desired.