Wow, thank you very much! I'll also go and read me through. As far as I see, the basic feature I need is a kind of parsing before the text is searched, whereby all middots in the text-to-search are eliminated. The other method would be to multiply the term-to-find with middots at every possibly place as you indicated. No idea how to achieve either way nor which one would be "less expensive", but the first way sounds easier...
Bernhard
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Zak Greant (Foo Associates) Gesendet: Donnerstag, 23. September 2010 16:29 An: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Betreff: Re: [Mediawiki-l] modify search engine
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 05:27, Scheid, Bernhard Bernhard.Scheid@oeaw.ac.at wrote:
Sorry, I did not mean a wildcard but a middot (·), the mail software seems to have misinterpreted the character. On my wiki, I use middot as a camouflage of ­ in the wikitext to mark silent syllable breaks. This works quite well, but the drawback is: the search engine no longer finds the term.
Aha. That's a different case then. I know very little about MediaWiki's search (and the docs aren't particularly helpful in this area.)
If I understand the docs correctly, the default search for MediaWiki uses the fulltext search capabilities of the underlying database. In the case of MySQL, there's no easy way to modify how the fulltext functionality treats content.
Digging around, I ran across a page [0] on the Lucene search extension [1] that indicates that the functionality you need might be available here.
I'll spend more time later looking at the various manual pages on search to see what else I can turn up.
[0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rainman/search_internals#Exact_article [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lucene-search