Hi there,

i have written an application which runs under german and englisch 
versions of Windows.
It includes a city databases which is ought to be searchable, yet there 
are a couple of issues which are of more logical nature...

My shell application surrounding the sqlite database only supports the 
ANSI charset (no Unicode), yet the underlying SQlite database has been 
created with UTF-8 support.

So far so good.

I got complaints from my client here that excentric city names like "Sào 
Paulo" cannot be found.
Further digging revealed two potential problems:

- how can SQlite be instructed to return search results which include a 
special character in it?
E.g. you search literally for "Zurich" on an englisch system and expect 
"Zürich" to be in the result set.

The next problem is that educated users might know that german Umlaute 
can be written out. The rules are simple:

ä becomes "ae"
ö becomes "oe"
ü becomes "ue"

So how would I go about filtering an educated user which looks for 
"Zuerich" and expects "Zürich" in the result set?

Best find on my behalf so far is to build a filter which replaces any 
occurence of "ae", "oe", "ue" with two placeholders ("%") which would 
effectively lead to a search of the type

select * from cities where name like "Z%%rich"


So far ,  so good, but my client also expects ANY simplification of a 
character to be recognized:
Cote d'azur for instance  should return "Côte d'azur"
or the Sao Paulo issue - how can a search for "Sao Paulo" return "Sào 
Paulo" in the result set?

Please note that I am using the normal command line sqlite3.exe application. I 
already started looking into soundex() yet unfortunately, it does not seem to 
be compiled into the normal command like executable. I also doubt that it would 
help?

Any help much appreciated, 

Christophe Leske

www.multimedial.de - i...@multimedial.de
http://www.linkedin.com/in/multimedial
Lessingstr. 5 - 40227 Duesseldorf - Germany
+49(0)180102 - 06 60 02 96 // +49(0)177 249 70 31

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