How can I find users with special characters in names?
Asked by Jan:

We have a lot of users from other countries with special characters in their names, such as

?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?

When searching I would like to find "Micha?" when entering "Michal". Currently I only find this user when I enter the special character in the search field, which I do not have on my keyboard, so that it is quite annoying. Is there any way to do this - or any workaround?   
Thanks for helping out :)


Answers:
author: Jan
body: Hi Shannon,

It is Confluence Server, Version 6.6.8

There is no message at all, I just cannot find the user. For my example "Micha?" I will only find this user when using the special character (which I cannot get in easily). Or I can search with ? instead of special character, but sometimes you are not sure how the name is written and where which special characters are used.

Therefore in this case it would be perfect to find all users also with special characters in their names based on the regular letter- don't know if that is possible. When I search "Michal Pol" in Google, I will also find links to "Micha? Pol". This is what I would like to see in Confluence, too. I hope this clears it up a little

comments: author: Shannon S
body: Jan,

I'm so sorry for the delay, but I've been having a hard time finding other examples of this.

Where exactly are you searching in Confluence when you have this issue. Is it with User Mentions or the People Directory? When you start to type "Micha" only, does it suggest Micha? as an option? I'm curious if you start typing the name if it is able to find them.

In addition, I would recommend reindexing and see if this helps.

1. Choose the cog icon ![](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/files/747833194/747833195/2/1517274813281/cog.png) , then choose General Configuration
2. Choose 'Content Indexing' under the heading 'Administration' in the left-hand panel.
3. Choose the 'Rebuild' button in either the 'Search Index' section.  
   (If the indexes have never been built, its button will indicate 'Build' instead of 'Rebuild.)

Lastly, if you want to type the character ?, on my computer if I hold down the L key, the character comes up as an option. I'm not sure which OS you're on, but it's possible this can help you in the future.

Shannon


author: Jan
body: Hi Shannon,

Thanks for following up. I know this is a bit special, but quite important for international organisations using Confluence, I guess,

I search for users in the main Confluence search or in the people directory, both with the same results. Confluence will suggest "Micha?" when typing "Micha". In this case this is no big deal, as the special character is at the end of the name. If it is the first or second letter, this is getting more difficult. The problem for users from other countries is that you really don't know if and where there could be special letters in the names.

We have a done reindexing, this did not really help.

And we all work with Windows OS, holding down the L key results in hundreds of L in the search field :)


author: Shannon S
body: Jan,

Thank you for confirming. I've done some further investigation and testing on this, and although I am not able to confirm. I would make an assumption that if you were able to change the [Indexing Language](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/configuring-indexing-language-150130.html) to Polish, it might help this issue. Unfortunately, I have discovered the following:
> Polish is out of scope because parts of the Stempel analyzer from Lucene uses a non-standard BSD based license which our legal team is still evaluating.

This is per a previous feature request, [CONFSERVER-57519](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-57519) (request to add missing indexing languages to Confluence.)

As a workaround, you would either need to change your keyboard to the Polish Programmer keyboard in order to type the letter, or have a look at the article below:

* [How to Type Polish Letters in Windows 10 on your English keyboard](https://polishlingo.com/2017/08/30/how-to-type-polish-letters-in-windows-10-on-your-english-keyboard/)

Please take the time to review this and please let me know if you have any questions about it.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Jan
body: Hi Shannon, I assume that this is fixed with Confluence 6.10 if I understand the Release Notes right: [https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-6-10-release-notes-952058221.html#Confluence6.10ReleaseNotes-Searchimprovementsforeveryone](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-6-10-release-notes-952058221.html#Confluence6.10ReleaseNotes-Searchimprovementsforeveryone?)


author: Shannon S
body: Hi Jan,

The ? character is encoded, so it's not necessarily an accented character. I've spoken to my Polish colleagues, and they let me know that the character ? is more like a 'w' sound and not an 'l', so I might not expect it to be replaced by an 'l' when searching.

In addition, I think that the search improvements are referring to this feature request:

* [CONFSERVER-22495](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-22495) *Allow search feature to ignore accent*

> In Confluence 6.10.0 we only implemented ignoring accents for a set of indexing languages:
>
> * Brazilian Portugese
> * English
> * French
>
> We have created a new ticket to gather interest in implementing the same feature for German and Czech. Please refer to [CONFSERVER-57455](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-57455 "Allow search feature to ignore accent for German and Czech").

As this is related to Lucene, and Polish is not supported by Lucene, I believe this might be the reason the characters are not ignored by search.

I'm getting in touch with some members of the Confluence development team to see if my findings are accurate, but I would bet this might be the reason why it's not working.

I'll follow-up with you when I hear back!

Shannon


author: Shannon S
body: Hi Jan,

Is this in Confluence Server or Cloud? If it's Server, can you let us know what version you're using?

What message do you get when searching for a user with a special character? That it cannot find the user?

Regards,

Shannon


Tags: search