Search and Unicode characters
The search is an exact search. It leads to difficulties in the following cases:
- Searching a name with an accent: "Theo" and "Théo" leads to completely different results.
- A nickname can be difficult to find for three reasons: weird characters, weird spacing or weird orthography.
What can be done? A first step would be to consider e
and é
as equivalent. Is it possible? Would ignoring whitespace be useful? What about ignoring things like '
or -
? Would it be possible (without integrating a search engine such as Elastic Search) to search by similarity (to fix typos)?