Find ignoring diacritical marks

[kretschmer]

Is there any way to find words in a huge Excel file whilst ignoring
diacritical marks?
Lets say, I'm looking for Dvorák; it should find the correct
spelling, but also Dvorak etc.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Is there any way to find words in a huge Excel file whilst ignoring
diacritical marks?
Lets say, I'm looking for Dvorák; it should find the correct
spelling, but also Dvorak etc.

Search for

dvor?k

See Help's "Wildcard characters you can use to find text or numbers"

 

[kretschmer]

Unfortunately, this doesn't really help. The file is full of central
and eastern european names which have diacritical marks all over the
place. The problem is remembering where they are.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Unfortunately, this doesn't really help. The file is full of central
and eastern european names which have diacritical marks all over the
place. The problem is remembering where they are.

Since characters with diacritical marks are separate characters, rather
than the base character with some sort of marker, wildcards are the best
one can do without a macro.

With a macro, one could specify which characters should be included in
the search, or one could use another application's methods, such as
regular expression analysis, etc.

 

[kretschmer]

I think there should be a simple method. Even this forum has replaced
the original R in the name which was Unicode 345 with a standard R
(Western 114). I'll manage anyway.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I think there should be a simple method. Even this forum has replaced
the original R in the name which was Unicode 345 with a standard R
(Western 114). I'll manage anyway.

I'm not sure what forum you're talking about - you're posting to this
newsgroup via Google with plain text iso-8859-1 encoding, which doesn't
have the Unicode 345 character.

In any case you're unlikely to find that type of pattern matching in any
spreadsheet application.

Perhaps if you copied the excel data to a Word table you could use
pattern matching, but it won't be automatic even there.

 

[kretschmer]

By forum I meant this present newsgroup.
My point was that I typed in the Unicode 345 character and Google knew
what to replace it with.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

I think there should be a simple method. Even this forum has replaced
the original R in the name which was Unicode 345 with a standard R
(Western 114). I'll manage anyway.

Try AppleScript. It has an operator

ignoring diacriticals

--code here

end ignoring


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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