Accent insensitive search in Grails

Question

How to make full text search using Grails Searchable Plugin accent insensitive ?

Answer 1

I have solved this problem with help of Peter Ledbrook's post, however some effort was needed:

Since latest searchable plugin uses Lucene 2.4.1 which does not contain ASCIIFoldingFilter (available since 2.9.0) and ISOLatin1AccentFilter doesn't support many languages I have created custom filter for stripping accents:

    import java.text.Normalizer
    import org.apache.lucene.analysis.Token
    import org.apache.lucene.analysis.TokenFilter
    import org.apache.lucene.analysis.TokenStream

    class StripAccentsFilter extends TokenFilter {

        StripAccentsFilter(TokenStream input)   {
            super(input)
        }

        public final Token next(Token reusableToken) {

            assert reusableToken

            Token nextToken = input.next(reusableToken)
            if (nextToken) {
                nextToken.setTermBuffer(Normalizer.normalize(nextToken.termBuffer() as String, Normalizer.Form.NFD)
                        .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", ""))
                return nextToken
            }
            return null
        }
    }

and corresponding filter provider:

    import org.apache.lucene.analysis.TokenStream
    import org.compass.core.config.CompassSettings
    import org.compass.core.lucene.engine.analyzer.LuceneAnalyzerTokenFilterProvider

    class StripAccentsFilterProvider implements LuceneAnalyzerTokenFilterProvider {

        public void configure(CompassSettings paramCompassSettings) {
        }

        public TokenStream createTokenFilter(TokenStream paramTokenStream) {
            return new StripAccentsFilter(paramTokenStream)
        }

    }

Now all you need to do is to register this filter provider in configuration of searchable plugin (grails-app/conf/Searchable.groovy):

compassSettings = [
    'compass.engine.analyzer.default.filters': 'stripAccents',
    'compass.engine.analyzer.search.filters': 'stripAccents',
    'compass.engine.analyzerfilter.stripAccents.type': 'StripAccentsFilterProvider' 
]