Ignoring accented characters

[Ben Rubinstein]

Hi jbv,

This one of a number of gaps that exist in the jungle of character processing 
in LiveCode.

I don't think there is a 'diacriticSensitive' property. Some part of LiveCode 
are clever about accents, see e.g.
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=15312
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=15443

As you note, it would be useful if there was a built-in function to strip 
diacritics, which has been requested (for 14 years now):
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6450

One trick that can be used in some contexts is to put the text into a field, 
retrieve the htmlText of the fields - which encodes many accented characters 
as entity names - and reduce these entity names back to the unaccented character.

There's also an enhancement request (pending for over 18 years) to expose this 
functionality without the need to use a field - useful for many purposes, not 
just for stripping accents:
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1372

This especially ought to be a cheap enhancement, since LC evidently 
incorporates the necessary tables already.

Putting text through html entities is not a perfect solution to implementing a 
"stripDiacritics" function, because e.g. you might render "—" as "m"; 
but as far as I know, currently it's either that or encode your own tables.

Ben


On 16/09/2022 15:10, jbv via use-livecode wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> Is there a way to ignore accented characters in LC, like in mySQL
> for instance ?
> Here's an example : I need these 2 array items below to be considered
> as 1 single entity :
>    add 1 to myArray["interprétation"]
>    add 1 to myArray["interpretation"]
> 
> Of course, I can write a function that removes accents, but I was
> wondering if there was a built-in function in LC to do that, in a
> similar logic as "set the casesentive to false" for instance.
> 
> Thanks you in advance.
> jbv
> 
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