Search for string value without diacritics

Question

Is it possible in AQL to search for document field string value without diacritics, e.g. through CONTAINS or LIKE functions? For example string value stored in database has value tomáš and I want to find it through value tomas.

Answer 1

I am afraid, this is not possible at the moment. There is no built-in diacritics-insensitive search in those functions.

Though, a few options would be:

• Additionally store a non-diacritics-version of the search-word in the document, so that you can query it that way.

• Write a custom function in which you would implement that kind of functionality. Though, I suspect that this would have a negative impact on performance. See the docs on that: https://www.arangodb.org/manuals/current/ExtendingAql.html

• Open a feature-request-issue to implement this kind of functionality in ArangoDB. Who knows, maybe it gets implemented? (https://github.com/triAGENS/ArangoDB/issues)