Opencart - Search regardless accent

Question

It had been written many times already that Opencart's basic search isn't good enough .. Well, I have came across this issue:

When customer searches product in my country (Slovakia (UTF8)) he probably won't use diacritics. So he/she writes down "cucoriedka" and found nothing.

But, there is product named "čučoriedka" in database and I want it to display too, since that's what he was looking for.

Do you have an idea how to get this work? The simple the better!

Answer 1

I'm ignorant of Slovak, I am sorry. But the Slovak collation utf8_slovak_ci treats the Slovak letter č as distinct from c. (Do the surnames starting with Č all come after those starting with C in your telephone directories? They probably do. The creators of MySQL certainly think they do.)

The collation utf8_general_ci treats č and c the same. Here's a sql fiddle demonstrating all this. http://sqlfiddle.com/#!9/46c0e/1/0

If you change the collation of the column containing your product name to utf8_general_ci, you will get a more search-friendly table. Suppose your table is called product and the column with the name in it is called product_name. Then this SQL data-definition statement will convert the column as you require. You should look up the actual datatype of the column instead of using varchar(nnn) as I have done in this example.

 alter table product modify product_name varchar(nnn) collate utf8_general_ci

If you can't alter the table, then you can change your WHERE clause to work like this, specifying the collation explicitly.

WHERE 'userInput' COLLATE utf8_general_ci = product_name

But this will be slower to search than changing the column collation.