Querying resources' strings, whatever the lang tag

[Olivier Rossel]

Hello.

I have a question about matching strings in SPARQL, whatever the lang tag.
As far as I understand, the only way to do that is to let SPARQL bind a
 ?variable
and then FILTER for equality of its str() against my matching string value.
For example:

SELECT ?person ?name
  WHERE
  {
  ?person foaf:name ?name .
  FILTER (str(?name) = "Jackie Chan") .
  }

Is it really the only way?
Won't it perform really bad?
Especially compared to the case where you know the lang tag:


SELECT ?person ?name
  WHERE
  {
  ?person foaf:name "Jackie Chan"@en
  }