Dave will it ever be possible to have our search engine for the database be able to recognize the European letters?
Such as these?
http://garden.org/thread/view_...

It is something I've wanted to get working for a long time but I must admit the solution has eluded me and I haven't looked at it lately. I know that in some areas of the database the moderator or admin adds as an alternate name the entry without the accent marks.

Do you have an example of a plant that contains these accent marks? I'd like to run some tests locally.

Hi Dave,

Hen and Chicks (Sempervivum 'Dornroschen')

this plants name is Dornröschen not Dornroschen; if you would correct it you can use it for tests;

Ich bedanke mich, Peter. I'll do some tests and see what I can do.

Thank you Dave and Peter.
I just came in from working in the yard most of the day.

Okay, I have made some progress. Starting now, when the search is indexing plants, it converts at that time the umlauted characters over to regular non-umlauted characters and then stores the result.

For example, as a consequence, if a plant is called Dornröschen then it will be stored inside the database as 'Dornroschen'. This way people can search for it using the non-umlauted character. The downside, though, is that it can not be searched using the umlauted character.

At this time, I can't see a way to have it both ways.

A question for Peter on this.
Peter what does the ö do in a name? Does it change the meaning of the name? Or just the sound of the vowel?

Dave, does this also apply to names of hybridizers?

This only applies to the main search engine.

Okay, then I will keep changing the names like André Smits

valleylynn said:A question for Peter on this.
Peter what does the ö do in a name? Does it change the meaning of the name? Or just the sound of the vowel?

it changes the sound; but with o instead of ö the word makes no sense...just like you may call it "yallow" instead of "yellow";

That could be a problem then with so many people becoming members from outside the U.S.

It could be. Eventually we may want to leave it alone and force the use of an umlaut when searching.

for us european who use umlaute this would be the right solution; but I know that many american collecters have changed this names to not-umlaute in their lists and would search it unavailingly....

maybe we could fix this when we use the "also sold as"-field for the spelling without umlaute !?

banker07 said:maybe we could fix this when we use the "also sold as"-field for the spelling without umlaute !?

This is precisely what the moderators of some other plant areas have done. In daylilies and roses, I think, they have the original spelling in the main cultivar field, then they add the regular latin character version into the also sold as field. It works well for searching because then every variation of the name is found.

We actually do it the other way around in roses and irises: We enter the regular Latin letters in the main cultivar field and enter the names with diacritical marks in the also-sold-as field. Otherwise, the names don't end up in alphabetical order because the system doesn't recognize the names with diacritical marks and puts them ahead of all the other plants beginning with that vowel or consonant. This results in duplicate entries because the name of the plant is not found in the logical place in the list of plants in alphabetical order.

As for umlauts, I think the conventional transliteration practice is to add an "e" after the regular Latin character. Dornröschen therefore would be transliterated Dornroeschen.

zuzu said:
As for umlauts, I think the conventional transliteration practice is to add an "e" after the regular Latin character. Dornröschen therefore would be transliterated Dornroeschen.

so we do in germany if a keyboard has no "ö" - but I think the rest of the world even lets the marks away;

a correct alphabetical order is very important!

so I would advise to do it like the rose-fans - but that is not my decision... ;-)

Just got home.
Thank you Dave, Zuzu and Peter.
I think it would work great doing the way the rose database does it. Now to go through all the entries and add that information.

Hi Lynn;

I will help you; while I'm going through the database I keep my eyes open