Accent characters missing in search excerpts

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around accent characters missing in search excerpts for older posts imported from phpBB 3.2 in 2018. Canapin noticed that while full messages retain accents, search excerpts do not, suspecting the issue originated during import. gerhard suggested rebaking posts, but this did not resolve the issue. RGJ confirmed the problem persists in other French forums and traced it to a 2018 commit that stripped accents from search queries, noting that excerpts were not properly fixed. Canapin concluded the issue is not critical and accepted the explanation, closing the case.

1

Quick question.

I noticed some weird thing.

When I use the search a the forum I imported from phpBB 3.2 in 2018, the results excerpts don’t have accented characters, whereas the full message contains accents.
It doesn’t happen in recent messages, so I believe this weird little bug was created during the importation.

Excerpt:

image
image896×339 24.1 KB

Full message:

image
image792×177 20.3 KB

I wonder if it really comes from the import script and if the bug still exists. Any idea?

2

Does rebaking the post fix the problem? There might have been a bug in 2018.

4

I rebuilt the HTML through Discourse interface and it didn’t resolve the issue. It’s not a serious one though, a lot of French people even don’t care about accents, I wouldn’t mind if it couldn’t be resolved.
I’m just curious about where the problem comes from.

5

I just tried this on another French forum - which was not imported - and topics from around that time do indeed not contain accented characters in their search excerpts.

Weird is that when I look at German forums, old topics do contain accented characters in their search excerpts :thinking:

Look at the last line of this log

commit cee51672c96d29174196717b734c7f7ba0754172
Author: Daniel Hollas <danekhollas@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue Oct 23 03:10:33 2018 +0200

    FIX: Strip accents from search query

    4481836 introduced accent stipping in search_indexer,
    but we need to strip it from the query itself as well

    TODO in search with diacritics:
     - Still need to fix excerpts on search page
6

Okay, so if the problem is no more, then this case can be closed (correct me if I’m wrong). Old excerpts with missing accents aren’t a big deal. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the explanation @RGJ!