The state of full text search in PostgreSQL 12
This sounds like it's about the problem of: I have a column filled with the last names of lots of people and I want a text search that will find these names, but, which takes into account all the various ways people end up writing that name. So, a search for 'mueller' should also find 'Müller'.<p>However, that problem sounds nearly intractable to me.<p>In basis it sounds like you just 'canonicalize' everything. You store, alongside 'Müller', also the string 'mueller' (the rule being: first transform all characters into their asciification, with the asciification of ü being defined as 'ue', then lowercase that.<p>The problem is, of course.. that searching for 'MULLER' should also find this person. And now we're more into trying to get this done by first deconstructing the unicode into ascii + accent marks and then just wiping out the accent marks.<p>But once we state that 'mueller', 'muller', and 'müller' need all be 'equal' to each other, where does it end? A last name can be from any of a thousand languages, each with their own unique conventions on how these things are asciified, and any given asciification must match any other. Sounds like a combinatorial explosion.<p>One could disregard this notion and say that 'muller' does not match 'müller'. However, note that generally, Sjögren's syndrome tends to be asciified as 'Sjogren's syndrome', probably because Sjögren was norwegian and I assume that the norwegian asciification of ö, is o. The german asciification of ö is oe however; and I can't tell from a last name if it is germanic in origin, norwegian in origin, or from the land of fairytales and flying pandas, such as Haägen-Dazs.<p>Just by thinking about this for a while I have concluded that it's hopeless, but perhaps I'm missing some fancy trick to at least try to make this problem dealable. So far my attempts to look for solutions tend to come down to advice to use unicode normalization and then get rid of all accents, then lowercase it, which obviously doesn't work at all (with that strategy, mueller would not find müller), or heuristic solutions (if a lot matches, good enough), which are their own can of worms.<p>Is there a solution to this to me seemingly impossible problem?