accents in full-text searching

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Enoch - 23 Nov 2004 16:25 GMT

If I have accented characters in my table which is full-text indexed then I
cannot search for the corresponding non-accented character. e.g. I have the
character "é" in my column (which is nvarchar), so searching for "é" comes up
with results because it is actually entered as "é" in the database, but
searching for "e" does not come up with any results. I have tried changing
the collation on this column to SQL Collation "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI"
and then I tried Windows Collation "Latin1_General_CI_AI". My database
collation name is "Latin1_General_CI_AI". I've set the default full-text
language to 0 (neutral).

Does anyone know how to solve the problem of accent insensitivity for
full-text searching?

my select @@version is:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 8.00.760 (Intel X86) Dec 17 2002 14:22:05
Copyright (c) 1988-2003 Microsoft Corporation Personal Edition on Windows NT
5.1 (Build 2600: Service Pack 2)

Thanks in advance

Enoch

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Hilary Cotter - 23 Nov 2004 16:37 GMT

This is handled correctly in SQL 2005. However in the meantime you should
trap for these accented versions of the words and expand your search for
both the accented and unaccented versions of the work.

So a search on bebe would be expanded to "b?b?" or "bebe".

There will be some correct stemming when you do a FreeText query is you are
using the French word breaker. For instance if you have removed noise words
for all verb forms of the verb to be (etre) from the French noise word list,
you will get search results to the accented versions of this word when doing
a FreeText search.

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Hilary Cotter
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> If I have accented characters in my table which is full-text indexed then
> I
[quoted text clipped - 24 lines]
>
> Enoch

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