Re: BUG #15548: Unaccent does not remove combining diacritical characters

I've attached a patch removes combining diacriticals. As with Latin and
Greek letters, it uses ranges to restrict its activity.

I have not submitted a patch for unaccent.rules, as it seems that a rules
file generated from generate_unaccent_rules.py will actually remove a large
number of rules (even before my changes), such as replacing the copyright
symbol © with (C), as well as other accented characters. It's probably
worth asking if the shipped unaccent.rules should correspond to what the
shipped generation utility produces, or not. I was surprised to see that it
didn't.

Please let me know if you see anything I need to change.

Best wishes,
Hugh

--
Hugh Ranalli
Principal Consultant
White Horse Technology Consulting
e: hugh@whtc.ca
c: +01-416-994-7957
w: www.whtc.ca


On Thu, 13 Dec 2018 at 13:50, Hugh Ranalli <hugh@whtc.ca> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 13 Dec 2018, 11:26 Daniel Verite <daniel@manitou-mail.org wrote:
>
>>         Tom Lane wrote:
>>
>> > Hm, I thought the OP's proposal was just to make unaccent drop
>> > combining diacriticals independently of context, which'd avoid the
>> > combinatorial-growth problem.
>>
>
> That's what I was thinking. Given that the accent is separate from the
> characters, simply dropping it should result in the correct unaccented
> character.
>
>>
>> In that case, this could be achieved by simply appending the
>> diacriticals themselves to unaccent.rules, since replacement of a
>> string by an empty string is already supported as a rule.
>> It doesn't seem like the current file has any of these, but from
>> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/unaccent.html :
>>
>>  "Alternatively, if only one character is given on a line, instances
>>  of that character are deleted; this is useful in languages where
>>  accents are represented by separate characters"
>>
>
> Yes, I had read that in the docs, and that's the approach I planned to
> take. I'll go ahead and develop a patch, then.
>
> Best wishes,
> Hugh
>
>>