Searching for Japanese text

[henpai]

Hello. I've always searched for the Japanese terms I have problems with before asking people here... but just now I got slightly suspicious about the 'no matches found.'

Running a few tests, I can't find anything written in Japanese from the forums, in kata or kana or kanji -- even Japanese text that I've cut&pasted from topics just to test this out ("こんにちは"). Searching for English text brings the correct matches fine.

I'm using Firefox 1.0.7 and typing Japanese with the Microsoft Global IME. While I'd figure it's an encoding problem of some kind, it's been exactly the same in IE6 with some failed Japanese searches and a successful English one.

Does anyone have ideas where the problem could lie, and how to go about fixing this?

 

[Mikawa Ossan]

I just tried searching for a few terms in Japanese, too, and I always got a "Sorry, no matches found" message.

Why is it that the search doesn't seem to work in Japanese?

Anyone?

 

[Glenn]

Check out posts #2-4 in this thread.

 

[henpai]

Very interesting. I still didn't understand it completely, though...☝

To make FULLTEXT MATCH work with Japanese UTF-8 text, be careful that words from your Japanese text be separated by the __ASCII__ space character, not Japanese UTF-8 (or other) spacing characters.

Should this mean that the SQL base from the forum side should automatically be instructed to modify the posts in this manner? Because, no matter how I tried to apply ASCII spaces in the searches, it never found anything. Searching for a single kanji like ﾅｽ窶 brought nothing either. Here it's separated by ASCII spaces on either side, but I'll have to see if the search picks it up with or without them.

//Edit: Nope, not the search this thread or search the forum worked either way.