[Digikam-users] Words match in digiKam search

[Jean-François Rabasse]

Hello,

I have some questions about the way digiKam performs strings
comparisons when searching for keywords.

1. The digiKam handbook says "searches are case insensitive".
Well, doesn't seem to be the case in my environment (digiKam 1.2.0,
Linux OpenSuSE 11.3 with KDE 4) with non US ASCII characters.

I have several pictures with captions containing the word "église"
(for non French readers, église is a church). E.g. picture 1 is
titled "Petite église rouge", and picture 2 is titled "Église à
vendre". (With an uppercase É because all my titles are
capitalised.)

Now, if I type (in the words search input field) the word "église",
I get picture 1 but not picture 2. And if I type "Église", I get
picture 2 but not picture 1. Clearly a case sensitive match,
concerning only the ISO Latin characters (typing "éGLISE" finds
picture 1 too, and "ÉGLISE" finds picture 2).

I suspect it could be a problem with non ASCII characters encoding.
My desktop environment is set to French, ISO-8859-1 charset.
How digiKam internally encodes its text strings ? UTF-8 maybe ?
This could possibly explain a mismatch.

Has anyone already seen such an issue, and what could be the best
way to walk around ? Is there a way to tell digiKam about user input
encoding, us-ascii, iso-8859-x, utf-8 ? Or is it shadowed by the
X11/Qt/KDE layers ?

2. Another question related to strings match, just because I'm
curious :-)
In the digiKam configuration window, folder "Miscellaneous",
there's a configuration parameter named "String comparison type",
with a selection menu proposing two options, Natural or Normal.

I couldn't find anything about that in the handbook. What is a
"Normal" comparison type, and a "Natural" comparison type ?

Thanks in advance,
Jean-François