Question

I have a tableview (linked to a database) and a search bar. When I type something in the search bar, I do a quick search in the database and display the results as I type.

The query looks like this:

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE name LIKE '%NAME%'

Everything works fine as long as I use only ASCII characters. What I want is to type ASCII characters and to match their equivalent with diacritics. For instance, if I type “Alizee” I would expect it to match “Alizée”.

Is there a way to do make the query locale-insensitive? I’ve red about the COLLATE option in SQL, but there seems to be of no use with SQLite.I’ve also red that iPhone SDK 3.0 has “Localized collation” but I was unable to find any documentation about what this means…

Thank you.

Answer 1

There are a few options for solving this:

1. Replacing all accented chars in the
   query before executing it, e.g.

   “Psychédélices” => “Psychedelices”
   “À contre-courant” => “A contre-courant”
   “Tempête” => “Tempete”
   etc.

   but this only works for the input so
   you must not have accented chars in
   the database itself. Simple solution but
   far from perfect.

2. Using a 3rd party library, namely ICU (links below). Not sure if it’s the best choice for iPhone though.

3. Writing one or more custom C functions that will do the comparison. More in the links below.

A few posts here on StackOverflow that discuss the various options:
How to sort text in sqlite3 with specified locale?
Case-insensitive UTF-8 string collation for SQLite (C/C++)
How to implement the accent/diacritic insensitive search in Sqlite?

Also a couple of external links:
SQLite and native UNICODE LIKE support in C/C++
sqlite case and accent insensitive searches