Diacritics and curly/smart quotes cannot be searched well, universally or in a note

Bug reports
1

I already did some forum searches, so I know there are feature requests regarding these issues, but, honestly, I believe this should be recognized as a bug because it breaks search functionality significantly. The problem I’m describing affects results in both universal searches and when searching inside an individual note.

When searching, I should not need to match diacritics and curly quotes perfectly to see full results. This is annoying, at best, and misleading at worst, delivering no or incomplete results in a way that may not be immediately obvious to the user. This is particularly frustrating when you’re a writer using the Smart Typography plugin or searching quotes saved from books, which almost always use curly quotes and diacritics where appropriate.

Mostly, I believe search should be curly/smart quote and diacritic agnostic or at least be connected to an option for exact or partial matching.

  • A search for cliche (no diacritic) or cliché (with diacritic) should return the same results.
  • A search for can't (no curly apostrophe) or can’t (curly) should return the same results.

Getting around this problem on desktop can be annoying. On mobile, it’s so frustrating and flow-breaking that I usually give up entirely.

1 Like
2

I totally agree on the need for that kind of feature.

However, I do not agree that it could be considered as a bug. It is definitely a new feature in terms of software development to allow for ignoring diacritics and the different types of quotes.

I would recommend you to move this post as a comment of this other post here Ignore accents/diacritics in search