• Open Menu Close Menu
  • Apple
  • Shopping Bag
  • Apple
  • Mac
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Watch
  • TV
  • Music
  • Support
  • Search apple.com
  • Shopping Bag

Lists

Open Menu Close Menu
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Lists hosted on this site
  • Email the Postmaster
  • Tips for posting to public mailing lists
Re: finding substring
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: finding substring


  • Subject: Re: finding substring
  • From: Chuck Soper <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 23:03:16 -0800

At 12:02 AM -0500 4/1/06, Daniel Jalkut wrote:
On Mar 31, 2006, at 10:26 PM, Chuck Soper wrote:
This answer makes sense from a programmer's perspective, but from a user's perspective it might be confusing. For example, if someone searches for "San Jose", the results include San Jose, California but not San José, Costa Rica.

My English atlas shows San Jose, California and San José, Costa Rica. I suspect that most users think of the two city names as being the same, but they're not.

Do you think that striping diacritical marks makes sense when comparing some geographical names/languages, but not all, such as localized Japanese names? If so, is there a way to make a distinction?

It sounds to me like the problem you are dealing with is more general than just diacritical markings. The identification of geographical location names seems especially dependent on localization. A good example was in the news lately in the US. The Winter Olympics were held in Torino, Italy. But many US newspapers described the event as being held in Turin. No amount of diacritical exemption will help the user who searches on Turin find the name if it's indexed as Torino.

I handle that particular case by using this geographical name "Torino (Turin)". Atlases use the same approach. Currently, our application is only in English and I'm still interested in finding a way to search for sub-strings and ignore diacritical marks. I believe that San José, Costa Rica is referred to (localized) as "San José" in Spanish and English, yet English speaking users will want to search for it without the accent.


How you deal with this largely depends on where you're getting your data from and what localizations you're targeting. If your geographical names are all "basically English," and your target localization is English, then maybe it makes sense to just do a diacrtiical insensitive search. But if your geographical names come from a more complicated source like the real world, you might have to resign to identifying places by a number of search terms. So "San Jose" matches "San José", "Turin" matches "Torino", etc.

It seems like this is a special situation where planning for multiple matching keys might be the right choice from the get-go.

Daniel

I completely agree (for a future version). Thanks for the suggestion.

Chuck



_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Cocoa-dev mailing list      (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden


References: 
 >finding substring (From: Chuck Soper <email@hidden>)
 >Re: finding substring (From: Aki Inoue <email@hidden>)
 >Re: finding substring (From: Chuck Soper <email@hidden>)
 >Re: finding substring (From: Daniel Jalkut <email@hidden>)

  • Prev by Date: Re: finding substring
  • Next by Date: Re: Help in 2 Diamensional Array
  • Previous by thread: Re: finding substring
  • Next by thread: Re: finding substring
  • Index(es):
    • Date
    • Thread