Using MS Index Server to search french Accented characters

[rvenable]

Hi everyone,
I'm new to this forum and I hope I'm in the right one. I have a question regarding MS Index server to search for french accent characters.

I have a search engine for our website that uses MS Index Server
and it works great but it doesn't find any results for searches that
contain french accented characters.

If I'm searching for "élément"...it doesn't find anything because the
page uses html codes for accents and this word would be written like
"(& e a c u t e ;)l(& e a c u t e ;)ment" (without the brackets and spaces) in my source code.
My page uses charset utf-8 but the Index server uses 2 separate files
(.htx and .idq files) and there doesn't seem to be any settings in there
for this problem.

Is there any way around this?

Thanks

[jhardman]

yes, unfortunately the best way around this is to take the search phrases and immediately put them through replace statements before you search, like this:

dim strToFind
strToFind = request.form("search")
strToFind = replace(strToFind, "é", "é")
'etc
'then execute the search function on the altered strToFind

I know it's not very straight-forward, but you could easily put all the replaces in a single function so you could use it very easily. Let me know if this helps.

Jared