Problem finding words with diacriticals in them

[paperback]

One issue with regex is that it does not appear to be able to ignore diacriticals. IME, this is often necessary because diacritical marks may have been incorrectly applied and need to be replaced.

For example. suppose you want to find the word "protege" (i.e. protégé). It will not return any results if there are diacriticals in it, unless you enter the letters with the exact same diacriticals..

Calibre needs to have a setting allowing it to read letters with diacriticals as ordinary letters. This will allow the user to find all instances of the word even if the diacriticals have been incorrectly applied.

[kovidgoyal]

Not something I am interested in implementing, too much work to try to get regex engines to act like that. It's a reasonable amount of work to have plain text searches do that, but not something I care enough about to implement.

[Karellen]

There are a few ways around that...

1. Search for é to find all instances where it is used,
2. From Tools>Reports>Characters, you can see a listing of all diacritics used and click on them to jump to them
3. Use the Spellcheck which does exactly what you ask...

[Biblos]

It's not exactly an answer to your question, but a palliative: why not search : prot?g?

More precise: prot[eéèê]g[eéèê]

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by paperback

For example. suppose you want to find the word "protege" (i.e. protégé). It will not return any results if there are diacriticals in it, unless you enter the letters with the exact same diacriticals.d all instances of the word even if the diacriticals have been incorrectly applied.

Calibre is using the regex library instead of the default re library. And regex has limited support for fuzzy searches.
For example: (these){e<=1} will find these, those, there (and many other strings).
If you search for (protege){e<=2} in Regex mode, it'll find protege , protegé and protégé.
It might of course also find other similar strings...