Hello there, One of our SITKA sites has noticed that some characters such as ø do not function as expected in search results. This problem was encountered with the author Peter Høeg -- a search for "Hoeg" generally works but it does not return some results that contain the special character unless they're found without the accent elsewhere in the MARC record without that character. In the database, items are in fact indexed with the ø.
The reason for this is that ø is can not be broken into a base character with a combining character -- é, è, ê are all based on e with a combining accent. ø is actually not an o and there is no combining character of a diagonal slash like that. ø is instead its own character. There are other similar characters that have this problem, for example the German ß transliterates as 'ss', and the character æ is like ae. All of this is normal standard Unicode behaviour, but not necessarily desirable from a user perspective. I'm wondering if any other sites have any experience with this or any ideas for dealing with this situation. This is a problem that mostly affects Germanic languages. Thanks! ~James Fournie BC SITKA
