Challenge checker search not turning up expected result

Question

I am trying to use the challenge checker search to see if I qualify for a particular challenge cache, namely GC5CKV2 - Challenge- Caches med højt aktivitets niveau. That's where I hit upon a perculiar behavior.

• If I write the search term "Caches med", the desired cache comes up as the first one.
• If I write the search term "Caches med højt", the search comes up empty.

It does not matter wheter I copy-paste the title from the cache. No result.

What gives ?

Answer 1

We have made a few fixes in our development environment that seems to work better. Expect a release within a few days.

Comments

Thanks, I'll be waiting :)

By the way, couldn't you have scheduled all-day-rain in Malmö on another day than today? I was there today and it poured! ;)

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I would say that it was the first time in 4-5 months that it rained pretty much the whole day. :)

Answer 2

Probably the letter "ø". A lot of non-english characters can be problematic in IT.

If you check the URL on caches on geocaching, you will see they remove Æ,Ø, Å and other non-english characters, probably to prevent issues with people not being able to type them out.

I have encountered many webpages that have had issues with those letters, and I am betting it is the issue here aswell.

Comments

Yeah, thought that as well. Turns out not to be the problem:

GC40QDC - Fussingø Challengecache # 2 - Multier (Denmark)

works like a charm writing "Fussingø"...

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It might be that the prompt just ignores the "ø". "Fussing" would yield the same result. Searching for "ø" and "" (the empty string) yields the same result AFAICT.

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Yeah, I think it is due to 'Ø' being the last character that it still works. The input probably ignores non-english characters, and then match it up against the names, so "Fussing" matches with "Fussingø", but "Hjt" does not match "Højt".

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Hmm, further testing disproves my theory.

Searching "Fussøing", does not match with "Fussingø"

So that made me think it has to match 100% of the word, as searching "sø" doesn't return anything.

But if you just search 'ø' it returns everything. Then my new theory was that they see 'ø' as some sort of a wildcard? If you search 's' it returns nothing.

But then the letters 'æ' and 'å' does the same thing. So I am back to assuming it is not handling non-english properly, but I can't figure out exactly how.