Unable to search using diacritic signs

Question

Hi,

Many languages have diacritic signs and there are lots of caches around the world that have diacritic signs in their names. I've just spotted this issue, so please treat it as a good start point for further analysis :)

Let me show you some examples:

"Ćwir, ćwir / Tweet, tweet" http://coord.info/GC4QZ5X -> http://project-gc.com/?wildsearch=%C4%86wir || http://project-gc.com/?wildsearch=%C4%87wir

This one is quite interesting:

"Ósma żona Sinobrodego" http://coord.info/GC5N4N0 -> this works: http://project-gc.com/?wildsearch=%C3%B3sma%20%C5%BCona but those do not work: http://project-gc.com/?wildsearch=%C3%B3sma http://project-gc.com/?wildsearch=%C5%BCona

The other interesting thing is that the search works for Icelandic ð:

Viðey http://coord.info/GC2Q86T -> http://project-gc.com/?wildsearch=vi%C3%B0ey

 

And now another part, when you go to the following challenge checker http://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC5M8M3/10113 and you take a look to the alphabet config, you will see: "ABCĆDEFGHIJKLŁMNOÓPQRSŚTUVWXYZŹŻ" and it works correctly, it finds caches that start with Polish diacritic signs.

 

So, I can't see any pattern, but I'm sure that somethings is wrong :) I was hoping to see PGC search working with those characters. Could you please investigate?

Cheers,

Mikołaj

 

PS. Of course if you try to search for "Ćwir ćwir" at the gc.com site, you won't be lucky too http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?key=%C4%86wir%20%C4%87wir

Comments

The problem is obvious related to the from the last news "At the same time we also upgraded our full text search indexing" and likely a utf-8 multi byte char problem

If you look at your search examples the result is the same as removing the first chacacter with the diacritic. That is why you only get one match on the second example is that "sma ona" only match one cache. The cache matches the other querys to but in not in the first 500 displayed caches, if you try to add the region Mazowieckie it will be only one find
It is quite obvious if you try "-sweden örebro" and "örebro" that ö is ignored.
It look like searches with diacritic in the middle of the name works correctly. I did not find an error and it matches correctly for strings like "Linköping"

The real reason I wrote this is regarding the checker. The reason that works is that works correctly is that all character matching of multibyte chars are done in native lua code and had no relation to the search on the website

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Ha! You are right, but I can see it as a problem :) If I want to find a cache with the name starting with "Ż" or any other diacritic sign, I need to use GSAK that is the tool that can handle it (as far as I know). And I don't like GSAK, honestly!

It would be great if this can be fixed in PGC.

Cheers.