Django Haystack : search for a term with and without accents

Question

I\'m implementing a search system onto my django project, using django haystack. The problem is that some fields in my models have some french accents, and I would like to f

Answer 1

I find a way to index both value from the same field in my Model.

First, write a method in your model which returns the ascii value of the fields:

class Car(models.Model):
    name = model.CharField()

    def ascii_name(self):
        return strip_accents(self.name)

So that in your template used to generate the index, you could do this:

{{ object.name }}
{{ object.ascii_name }}

Then, you just have to rebuild your indexes !

Answer 2

You must do something like follow:

Cars(indexes.SearchIndex):
    name = indexes.CharField(model_attr='name')

    def prepare(self, obj):
        self.prepared_data = super(Cars, self).prepare(obj)
        self.prepared_data['name'] += '\n' + strip_accents(self.prepared_data['name'])
        return self.prepared_data

I don't like this solution. I would like to know some way to configure my seach backend to do it for me. I use whoosh.

Answer 3

Yes, you're on the right track here. Sometimes you do want to store fields multiple times, with different transformations applied.

An example of this in my application is that I have two title fields. One for searching which gets stemmed (the process by which test ~= test ~= tester), and another for sorting which is left alone (the stemming interferes with the sort order).

This is an analogous case.

In my schema.xml this is handled by:

<field name="title" type="text" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="false" />
<field name="title_sort" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="false" />

The type "string" is responsible for storing the "as-is" version of the title.

By the way, it you're stripping accents just to make words easier to search for, this is something that might be worth looking into: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters#solr.ISOLatin1AccentFilterFactory