hello,

i'm experimenting with fulltext searches and came across a problem.

my table is in unicode and includes names from different languages. is
it possible to to implement a fulltext search that would allow me to
find rows with an entry including characters i may not know or at least
may not know how to type? what i have in mind is something similar to
"... where name like 'honor_'", or parts of words (to include different
cases), like 'kritik%', that matches 'kritika', 'kritike', 'kritiki'
and so on.

because of this i am seriously considering using a search technique
without the fulltext index.

thanks.

Try using the BOOLEAN MODE.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...t-boolean.html

This has the ability to do partial words by ending the word with a star
(*)

e.g. 'honor*'

you can't do wild character matches though, and its not keen on special
characters.

I got round this by having a search field with all the words processed
by stripping out all characters it doesn't like. I then search against
that field with search words processed in the same way.

Tigger

omeldoid@gmail.com wrote:
> hello,
>
> i'm experimenting with fulltext searches and came across a problem.
>
> my table is in unicode and includes names from different languages. is
> it possible to to implement a fulltext search that would allow me to
> find rows with an entry including characters i may not know or at least
> may not know how to type? what i have in mind is something similar to
> "... where name like 'honor_'", or parts of words (to include different
> cases), like 'kritik%', that matches 'kritika', 'kritike', 'kritiki'
> and so on.
>
> because of this i am seriously considering using a search technique
> without the fulltext index.
>
> thanks.

Tigger wrote:
> Try using the BOOLEAN MODE.
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...t-boolean.html
> This has the ability to do partial words by ending the word with a star

thanks for this, i must have missed it.

> you can't do wild character matches though, and its not keen on special
> characters.

that's a pitty. but special characters aren't ignored (at least not in
my version). this makes it impossible to find words that have any such
character anywhere but at the very end. another solution i've come
across was to put the most important of those characters onto a web
page right next to the search form. i found it useful but you cannot
have the entire unicode set pasted there ...

i reverted to `where ... like ... ' as my tables will never grow to
millions of rows. still, i didn't want to use poor code.

andrej