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Pablo Bianchi
Asked: 2017-04-26 11:06:33 +0800 CST

Search with diacritics / accents characters with `locate` command

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Sometimes I need to search files with accented characters (diacritic in general), usually with locate/mlocate. I wish to setup (maybe in /etc/updatedb.conf) so it let me search for this special characters using a certain language mapping, for example:

a == âàáäÂÀÂÄ
e == êèéëÊÈÉË
i == îïíÎÏ
o == ôöóÔÖ
u == ûùüÛÜÙ
c == çÇ
n == ñ

So locate -i liberación also should search for file names with string liberacion and even liberaciòn.

Notes and assumptions

  • And maybe others: ÂÃÄÀÁÅÆ ÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏ ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞ ßàáâãäåæç èéêëìíîïðñòóôõö øùúûüýþÿ.
  • This is a common situation on romance languages like Spanish, French and German.
  • I'm always using a locale 100% UTF-8.
  • I would rather not have to use regular expressions.
  • A patch might use ASCII transliterations of Unicode as Unidecode/cUnidecode does. Most of mlocate is written on C.

Related

command-line

2 Answers

  1. If we take a look at updatedb.conf(5), we'll find that there is no much we can do with configuration items.

    So we are going to write a script using locate; At the end we are able to run something like my-locate.sh liberacion or my-locate.sh liberâciòn and it will brings us all the possible combinations.

    Lets start

    First create a simple file as our database anywhere you want it to be, e.g: ~/.mydb; then add your accents characters into that file like this:

    aâàáäÂÀÂÄ
eêèéëÊÈÉË
iîïíÎÏ
uûùüÛÜÙ
cçÇ
oôöóÔÖóòòò
...
...

    Then we need a small script which does the job for us, I wrote a simple one:

    #!/bin/bash

# Final search term 
STR=""

# Loop throughout all characters of desired string
for (( i=0; i<${#1}; i++ )); do

  # Split the string in one char
  CH="${1:$i:1}"

  # Find all possible combinations of this char
  CHARS=$(grep "$CH" ~/.mydb)

  # Add an "or" operator between characters
  REG=$(echo "$CHARS" |  sed 's/.\{1\}/&\|/g' )
  REG="($REG)"

  # Append all possible combination of this character
  # to our final search term as an or statement
  if [ "$REG" == '()' ];
  then
   STR=$STR$CH
  else
   STR=$STR$REG
  fi

done

# locate it using regex
locate --regex "$STR$"

    Now save it somewhere in your PATH with a desired name, e.g: in ~/bin. It should be already in your PATH environment.

    After all simply use something like this to search all possible combinations.

    my-locate.sh liberacion

    Will find for me all of these:

    ~/lab/liberacion
~/lab/liberaciòn
~/lab/liberación
~/lab/liberâciòn
~/lab/liberäciòn
~/lab/libÈrâciòn
    • 3
  2. Best Answer

    Now with mlocate 0.26 we have -t --transliterate option (see the man page) on Ubuntu 18.04+ (without the need of workarounds):

    Creating some test files:

    $ touch liberación liberacion liberaciôn

    Update and search:

    $ updatedb
$ locate --transliterate liberacion 
/home/pablo/liberacion
/home/pablo/liberación
/home/pablo/liberaciôn

    So now locate -t liberación also search for files with string liberacion and even liberaciòn!

    Finally, creating an alias on my .bashrc :-)

    $ alias locate="locate --transliterate"
    • 2