[Plugin: Relevanssi] utf-8 support

Actually, I’ve only tried this plugin with UTF-8 content, so the problem is somewhere else. The plugin uses multibyte string operations and so on.

Please give me more details: where does it show the symbols, what settings are you using and so on.

I’m having a different problem but might be related to encoding too.
I have a blog on which the posts are in greek (which means no latin characters). Every time I do a search for a greek word, there are no results. If I search for an english word contained into the posts, I’m getting results.
I deactivated the plugin and results are found again on greek words.

Any ideas?

Does Relevanssi index your content properly? For example, if you check the “25 most common words” list on the plugin settings page, does it list Greek words?

I did a quick test and Relevanssi was able to index and search Greek text without problems.

Thanks for the reply msaari. It’s weird that it works for you!
To answer you question, no all the indexed common words are english words.

I don’t know if it makes any difference but I have the latest WP version (2.8.2), the db encoding is utf8_general_ci and I’m running it locally, using XAMPP.

I was taking a look at the plugin tables and I noticed that in wp_relevanssi, under “terms” the vast majority of entries is empty. Is that normal?

No, that is not normal… For some reason the Greek terms aren’t making it to the index. When I look at the MySQL table in my test case, the Greek terms appear as question marks.

I created a new blog (v2.8.2, utf8_general_ci) out of the box: default theme, no other plugin. Added a couple of posts in greek, installed Relevanssi and the same thing happens. No greek words indexed or found during search..

Too bad, because it seems to be a very helpful plugin (tested with english terms)! Back on the quest for finding a good search plugin then…

Thanks for your help msaari. If you can figure out what’s wrong and maybe have a fix in a latter version it will be great and I would be more than happy to give it another try! If you have any ideas for a quick fix or something, I’ll be checking back this topic. Thanks for your time.

I repeated the same experiment, and everything works just as it should. WP 2.8.2, MySQL 4.1.22, utf8_general_ci.

One thing comes to mind, though – when I test this, I copy-paste Greek text from another website (for example from this Lorem Ipsum page). Does that make any difference?

Another thing you can try: on line 645 you can find the query that inserts the terms in the index. You could try echoing that query instead of feeding it to wpdb->query, to see if the terms are present. If they are, the problem is definitely with MySQL.

That’s my guess, anyway – something in your database setup that doesn’t co-operate. As long as I’m unable to reproduce the problem, I can’t help much more.

This is really weird. First of all I changed line 645 as you said and all the greek words appear as questionmarks: ????. Same result in both blogs.

I repeated the experiment, new blog, same version and encoding and created a few posts. Installed Relevanssi and now for every greek word I search for, all the posts are returned as results, even if the word does not exist in the post. Even if the “word” I search for is a random combination of 20 characters.

Now back to my first blog, which has real posts. After deleting the plugin and the tables in the db and reinstalling it, again no results are returned for any search in greek. Keeps working as it should when an english word is used.

In both blogs the posts are a combination of real posts that I have written and dummy test from the same site that you got your text. I don’t think it makes a difference though. I played around with the db collation and the respective options in wp-config.php with no luck.

I understand that since you can’t see the problem you can’t just guess what it might be but I really appreciate you trying!

I think the question marks are ok, since that’s how the Greek characters appear in the db in my blog where everything works. If the database still shows nothing, then I’m fairly sure the problem is with the database.

Assuming it’s a db problem, you could try searching for MySQL support. With quick googling, I found something:

mySQL database problem with greek.
some MySQL bug involving Greek, couldn’t check it closer because the server is down

I am having the same issues when using Swedish letters like ? ? ?. Whenever a search word contains one of the above characters Relevanssi seems to cut off the search word at that letter. So if I search on ler?gare (not a real word) Relevanssi searches on ler.

Also the index seems to cut off the files at the special character, only the remainder of the word gets stored.

? ? ? are stored as real characters in the database and all the tables are utf8.

When do you think the strip occurs? Do you think it goes wrong when Relevanssi hits the database or before that?

Kindly, Marcus.

Also if I search on only Swedish letters I get mb_strpos() [function.mb-strpos]: Unknown encoding or conversion error. in relevanssi.php on line 756.

The page character set is set to UTF-8 as well.

Kindly, Marcus.

The issue seems to be the three occurrences of preg_replace() in the code. Preg_replace is not utf-8 safe so it should be switched to mb_ereg_replace() instead.

When I switch over the search works properly for me. I get weird characters in the database now instead of cut off words. Don’t know if this impacts the plugin overall in some way.

Kindly, Marcus.

Ok there seems to be quite alot that needs to be replaced in order for Relevanssi to work properly with utf8 content all the way.

Since I really need something like this I will try to fix everything utf8 related, hopefully I can do it!

strtolower() in relevanssi_tokenize() ruins utf-8 characters as well. I will try to follow your search function step by step and fix stuff along the way. Hopefully the search function will get a hit on the search term I’m using when I have gone through it since the word is in the posts in my database.

Kindly, Marcus

Interesting. I can search for words with ??? in them without any problems at all! Same with the Greek letters… So something funny there, that’s somehow dependent on server setup or something like that. As for Swedish (and Finnish) alphabet showing up funny in the database, that’s curious too, because while the Greek stuff is all question marks when I look at the databases, ??? is always just correct.

I know the code is probably a bit patchy there – I did figure out I needed multibyte support when I got nasty results as multibyte characters where cut in two, but I admit I’m not a pro on the topic. Hence the use of preg_replace(), for example.

Apparently strtolower() should be replaced with mb_convert_case().

Once you’ve done with the script, send your version to mikko at mikkosaari.fi and I’ll see what you’ve done. It would really help debugging if I could setup a test system that doesn’t work just the way it should be =)