How to map À, Á, Â, Ã, Ä, Å to A for more efficient search?

Question

I am writing an Android application that need to search a set of strings with those symbols on some character.

In order to make search results more powerful, I would like to map À, Á, Â, Ã, Ä, Å to just A. For example, if the user's query is "Test" the following string should matches with query: Tȅst, Tȇst, Teśt, etc.

Is there any possible way of doing this in Android with API level >= 8?

You could always replace those characters with A using a string replace. — developerwjk, Sep 27 '13 at 23:05
Or, use a Collator that considers them all to be equivalent. — cHao, Sep 27 '13 at 23:12

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 27 '13 at 23:19

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Lucene does this kind of thing. Take a look at the org.apache.lucene.analysis.icu.ICUNormalizer2Filter for an approach to text normalization for search.

answered Sep 27 '13 at 23:19

Aurand

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Josh T · Answer 2 · 2013-09-27T23:16:19.973

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String text = "Your SeÅrchable Text";
String searchMe = text.replaceAll("[ÀÁÂÃÄÅ]", "A");

I would just replace all of them in a searchable version of the main String. Pretty simple! If there are multiple cases (such as weird 'E' characters, just do another replaceAll:

searchMe = searchMe.replaceAll("[EEEEEE]", "E"); //(note: those are the weird Es in there)

edited Sep 27 '13 at 23:16

answered Sep 27 '13 at 23:09

Josh T

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Simple but are you sure you have dealt with all possible cases? – Stephen C Sep 27 '13 at 23:12
I'd be surprised if your approach does work for the OP. Look at the other Answer and the linked Question for other (better) solutions. – Stephen C Oct 01 '13 at 11:51

How to map À, Á, Â, Ã, Ä, Å to A for more efficient search?

2 Answers2