Advanced search case sensitivity issue

Question

The advanced search on the dashboard behaves counter intuitively at times because it's case sensitive and there is no option, that I could see, to turn off that case sensitivity. Eg: for a challenge you don't qualify for so you want to search to find caches where the cache owners name starts with an X. This will bring up cache owners starting with an X but not those starting with an x. Similarly searching for a word in a cache name is needlessly difficult because of the case sensitivity.

Could you default the search to case insensitive as that's what most people would expect and add a checkbox option to turn on case sensitivity for the field.

Answer 1

It's not that easy. We have earlier had more case insensitive searches, but there were so many conflicts all over the place.

For standard A-Z it's quite easy. But when you mix in UTF8 it's quite hard. Which of these should count as the same character?

E, e, é, è, É, ë, ê and so on.

We do however see your point and might get back to it and make active design decisions here and there. But as I said, it's not easy at all.

The behavior is also dependent on which search type you do. If you do an extended search it will be case insensitive in most cases. Example: https://goo.gl/GQiYL6

Comments

Thinking of cache names and user names. I'm not 100% sure but I don't believe that UTF8 characters are allowed are they? So if you know the field is only simple alphanumeric doesn't that mean the input field can be similarly constrained and thus allow case insensitive searching?

Since I don't use any accented characters in typical English I'm not acquainted with the issues around them my gut feeling though is that since several programming languages have built in accent stripping functions that it's a common enough thing to do?

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Take a look at http://coord.info/GC6KBBB for example, both the cache name and owner have UTF8 characters.

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Cache names are UTF8
an example is one with som icon in  Sweden
✎ Godjulkorsord ♡  https://coord.info/GC5HT6F
Ans one int Taiwan in Chinese
蘇花古道:大南澳越嶺(北口) http://coord.info/GC6NCF2

A strange thing I noticed it that caches in Taiwan, China Japan etc have name in English
But cache in Europe most often have names in local languages.
It feel quite strange that I understand most cache name in Asia b
I would guess that is because caches there started with hides by foreigners and most caches was tourist. Rather more early hides and findes by locals in Europe.

But now when i think about it another reason is likely that cache names was not UTF-8 in the beginning and local name was impossible in Asia but not in Europe. And not it is a tradition and it continues.