Question

Is there a way to get .Net to positively match strings, even if some characters are not exactly the same? Examples of characters that should be considered to be similar could be: ‘a’/’á’ and ‘í’/’i’. The Chrome browser find-as-you-type recognizes these characters as being equivalent.

Answer 1

Take a look at this blog post by Michael Kaplan. The code here uses standard .NET class library methods for

1. Normalising Unicode strings, in this case, using a “composite” normalisation form which ensures that a character like á is represented by separate code points for a and its diacritic(s);
2. Identifying the diacritics using classes that expose databases of information about Unicode characters, and stripping them out.