Problems with Search Function

  • Resolved tneorg

    (@tneorg)


    8 years, 5 months ago

    Happy New Year!

    I am having an issue with the search feature in this table.

    Trying to search on the following examples brings strange results.
    https://organhistoricalsociety.org/historic-organs/citations/

    Searching for “Johnson” no entries come up.
    If I search on “J” or Jo” or “Joh” or “John” entries appear.
    Searching on any more than 4 letters like “Johns” no entries appear.

    Same here:

    Searching for “Simmons” no entries come up.
    If I search on “S” or Si” or “Sim” entries appear.
    Searching on any more than 3 letters like “Simm” no entries appear.

    This is reproducible for most entries. Any ideas of what is happening?

    Thanks for any help!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Tobias Bäthge

    (@tobiasbg)

    8 years, 5 months ago

    Hi,

    thanks for your post, and sorry for the trouble at the start of the new year.

    The reason for this seems to be invisible space characters.
    Take for example the word “Basil­i­ca”. This actually looks like “Basil-i-ca” where the “-” resemble invisible space characters. (You can “feel” this when copy/pasting the word e.g. into your browser address bar and then navigating the cursor through it via the left/right arrow keys. You will see that it “stops” once on each side of the “i”.
    My assumption is that these invisible characters are what’s causing this.

    I have no idea how these ended up in your table though. Did you maybe import this table from Excel or similar?
    The best way to remove them should be to export the table to a CSV file and open that in a normal text editor. There, one could do search/replace and replace the invisible space character with “nothing”.

    Regards,
    Tobias

    Thread Starter tneorg

    (@tneorg)

    8 years, 5 months ago

    Thank you! Yes it was imported from a spreadsheet. This makes total sense. I’m sure Microsoft had something to do with this…. 😉

    Thread Starter tneorg

    (@tneorg)

    8 years, 5 months ago

    One more question. I tried exporting as a CSV file with all three delimiter choices. The first column has html links in it. It only downloads the first dozen or so html links, but the rest are not included. Is there another way to extract the info?

    Thread Starter tneorg

    (@tneorg)

    8 years, 5 months ago

    Ok, I figured out the issue. It’s a setting in wp-Typography. It automatically hyphenates every word on a loaded page. When I turned off “Hyphenate words with a capital letter” the searches in Tablepress worked properly. I need to look into that plug-in!

    Thread Starter tneorg

    (@tneorg)

    8 years, 5 months ago

    Resolution:

    I added the CSS class “noTypo” to the table, and the table does not auto hyphenate, but the rest of the site does. This might be useful to know. Search works as expected now.

    Plugin Author Tobias Bäthge

    (@tobiasbg)

    8 years, 5 months ago

    Hi,

    wow, interesting find! I had never heard of such a plugin! Good to hear that you were able to fix this!

    Best wishes,
    Tobias

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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