Re: diacritic-fold-search?

[Lewis Perin <perin@panix.com>]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> Is there a way to search ignoring diacritics, e.g. capturing "apres"
>> both with and without an accent grave over the "e"? 
>
>Great question.  I don't think so, but I'm guessing that lots of users could
>make good use of such a feature!
>
>Unless someone points out here that this is already possible, why don't
>you submit an enhancement request for this feature (`M-x
>report-emacs-bug' is also for enhancement requests): be able to toggle
>Isearch distinguishing certain sets of similar chars (diacritics).
>
>There could be predefined sets of equivalence classes of chars (e.g.,
>the same letter, modulo diacritical marks).  And users could be able to
>customize these classes.
>
>Likewise, for punctuation chars that are very similar (in
>purpose/visually), such as straight quotes and curly quotes, and
>no-break hyphen, hyphen, and the various dashes.
>
>Likewise, for whitespace chars other than the standard SPC, TAB, etc.
>For whitespace, I believe there might be some handling of additional
>chars such as no-break space, but what's needed, here too, is a simple
>way to toggle distinguishing them on/off.
>
>But your use case is the best one: be able to optionally ignore diacritical
>marks when searching.

It may not be totally irrelevant to note that search engines make
diacritic-agnostic search the default.  And some Web browsers (Chrome
but not Firefox) do this for searches of a page they’re displaying.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin / perin@acm.org
http://babelcarp.org