MongoDB match partial text ignoring accents (diacritics)

Question

I have two fields that I should match with simple text.

I'm currently using Jenssegers'Laravel Mongodb (https://github.com/jenssegers/laravel-mongodb)

The code right now is like this, and works almost as like I want:

$nameFilter = [[ 
    '$match' => 
    [
        '$or' =>
        [ 
            [ 
                'content.itemList.name' => ['$regex' => new Regex($request->q, 'i')] 
            ],
            [ 
                'content.itemList.commonName' => ['$regex' => new Regex($request->q, 'i')] 
            ]
        ]
    ]
]];

What's missing is that I want to ignore accents in the fields name and commonName, so for example if content.itemList.name is "foöBàr" and the query is "obar" I should get it in the results.

Edit: after days of trying I haven't found a solution yet.

Something so trivial I suppose should be easily done in MongoDB.

Other things I've tried:

Created a text index for the fields I want to search
Use collation, which apparently doesn't work with Regex

Example documents

{
    lastname: "Mbappé",
    firstname: "Kylian",
    name: "Kylian Mbappé"
    otherfields: 123
}

What I want:

A query that matches any of lastname, firstname, or name with partial string (lian, appe, mbappe, etc.) both case-insensitive and diacritic (accent) insensitive.

Good matches should be, for example: "Mbappe" "appe" "mbappé" "Kylian" "kylian mbappe"

If you are using Mongodb Atlas, you could use Atlas Search autocomplete operator for this. https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/reference/atlas-search/autocomplete/#autocomplete-ref — Doug, Aug 30 '20 at 21:10
I just posted a solution to this problem in this question: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41441071/use-of-collation-in-mongodb-regex/71685820](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41441071/use-of-collation-in-mongodb-regex/71685820) — Raphael Soares, Mar 31 '22 at 01:23

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 27 '20 at 11:43

The use of regex with collation is indeed not supported Use of collation in mongodb $regex

I am guessing that in order to make this work, I would to create a workaround such as a field in the MongoDB data without diacritics in order to use it for the search function.

Using your example document

{
    lastname: "Mbappé",
    firstname: "Kylian",
    name: "Kylian Mbappé"
    otherfields: 123
    name_clean: "Kylian Mbappe" // this is new
}

I would comment on the original post but Stack Overflow says that I need 50 reputation to do that :(

This was an alternative I thought about, I will implement it if I don't find a more direct solution! — Gregory Wullimann, Aug 28 '20 at 09:23

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 30 '20 at 06:20

0

I think try in mongodb like this it will work.

db.users.find({name:{$regex: 'appe',$options:'i'},firstname:{$regex: 'lian',$options:'i'},lastname:{$regex: 'appé',$options:'i'}})

answered Aug 30 '20 at 06:20

Prakash Harvani

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MongoDB match partial text ignoring accents (diacritics)

2 Answers2