[Koha-devel] proper sorting order and search for Swedish characters and ISBN search

[Gaetan Boisson]

  Hello,

I have been trying several things to try to sort this out, and haven't 
found a way (yet) that would avoid ugly compromises.

The issue is: in Swedish ä, ö and å are separate letters. Not variants 
of a and o. This means that searching for å shouldn't bring up a. When 
sorting, they belong to the very end of the alphabet, after z, not along 
a and o.

ICU has some kind of setting that allows to standardize isbns for 
searching, so you can search for any hyphenated variant, and still find 
the isbn that actually appears in your data. I *think* this works by 
removing all the hyphens in the index, but i am not quite sure.

Anyway, in order to get the Swedish letters right, we had to do some 
specific chr configuration. Doing this forces us not to use ICU, which 
means giving up on standardized isbn search.

Alternatives are transforming all the isbns in the records (quite uly). 
Or using the SearchWithISBNVariations syspref, but as far as i 
understand, this only works when using the dedicated isbn index, not in 
the simple search.

Has anyone found a more satisfactory way of handling this?

Thanks,


-- 
Gaetan Boisson
Chef de projet bibliothécaire
BibLibre
+33(0)6 52 42 51 29
108 rue Breteuil 13006 Marseille
gaetan.boisson at biblibre.com