Filtering with diacritical marks

It would be really useful to have an option on the components such as FilterListBox to ignore diacritical marks. That would allow for a search of para (for example) to return both paralelogramo and parábola in Spanish.

[JanMiksovsky]

Progress report: I’ll be checking in a fix for this.

Like most international issues, this turns out to be more complicated than it first looks. The Intl.Collator object looks very promising for this situation — but unfortunately appears only used in comparing strings. What FilterListBox does to search strings.

I did find a helpful string normalization snippet that removes accents which seems to work. However, it’s not strictly speaking correct. In some languages, accents matter. Example: ä and a have the same base letter in German, but in Swedish those are separate base letters. A Swedish user may therefore be disappointed/annoyed if those letters are treated the same for filtering purposes.

That said, removing accents seems more helpful in most cases, so I’ve gone ahead with that as a basis for a fix. I’ve also exposed a method on the component that a dev can override to customize the matching behavior for specific situations/locales.

[klobetime]

Great – thanks! I missed your last reply for some reason; I’d have been interested in helping but really didn’t have the time to be honest.