Transliterate query string for typeahead.js

Question

I am using typeaheadjs and I would like to transliterate search query -before- it is sent to server.

@Edvad Zagorski gave excellent php array for doing this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6837302/377192

But what I would need is to do the same in beforeSend() method. So if user starts typing something like

čikago

it would send

cikago

to server.

I tried countless tricks of twig: json_encode, raw, url_encode... None worked as I don't really get those encodings.

Is it even possible? I guess the problem is that beforeSend() method receives urlEncodedQuery, not the real one.

Answer 1

The tokenizer-based solution I proposed on GitHub:

var charMap = {'àáâããäå': 'a', 'èéêë': 'e', 'ç': 'c', 'ß': 'ss', /* ... */};

var normalize = function(str) {
  $.each(charMap, function(chars, normalized) {
    var regex = new RegExp('[' + chars + ']', 'gi');
    str = str.replace(regex, normalized);
  });

  return normalized;
}

var queryTokenizer = function(q) {
  var normalized = normalize(q);
  return Bloodhound.tokenizers.whitespace(normalized);
};

var engine = new Bloodhound({
  // ...
  queryTokenizer: queryTokenizer
});

Answer 2

I had this same issue. Get the latest version of Typeahead (0.10.1 at the time of this post). This version integrates the use of Bloodhound which allowed be to use a .replace() on the query before submitting.

Here are the Bloodhound docs: https://github.com/twitter/typeahead.js/blob/master/doc/bloodhound.md#remote