User's name containing accent not shown in results if no accent in search query

[nyomanjyotisa]

Explanation of Change

Fixed Issues

$ #53671
PROPOSAL: #53671 (comment)

Tests

Same as QA Steps

• Verify that no errors appear in the JS console

Offline tests

Same as QA Steps

QA Steps

1. Click on FAB > Start a chat
2. Enter a user's name without an accent mark, e.g. Álex, Timón
3. Verify that the username with the accent mark is displayed in the search results

• Verify that no errors appear in the JS console

PR Author Checklist

• I linked the correct issue in the ### Fixed Issues section above
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Screenshots/Videos

Android: Native

Android-Native.mp4

Android: mWeb Chrome

Android-mWeb.Chrome.mp4

iOS: Native

iOS-Native.mp4

iOS: mWeb Safari

iOS-mWeb.Safari.mp4

MacOS: Chrome / Safari

MacOS-Chrome.mp4

MacOS: Desktop

MacOS-Desktop.mp4

[melvin-bot]

@c3024 Please copy/paste the Reviewer Checklist from here into a new comment on this PR and complete it. If you have the K2 extension, you can simply click: [this button]

[nyomanjyotisa]

The original issue mentioned about countries search

User is not displayed in the search results unless the accent mark is entered. However, when setting an address in Profile, countries that have diacritics are shown when searching without them.

Country names are filtered using StringUtils.sanitizeString

App/src/pages/settings/Profile/PersonalDetails/CountrySelectionPage.tsx

Line 35 in 840c227

searchValue: StringUtils.sanitizeString(`${countryISO}${countryName}`),

Which removes diacritics and special characters (e.g., "Côte d'Ivoire" can be found by searching "Cote divoire").
Meanwhile, in this PR, user names are filtered using StringUtils.normalizeAccents, which results in no matches when searching for "D'artagnan" with "Dartagnan". To get a result, the query must include a space, such as "D artagnan" or "D'artagnan".
However, applying StringUtils.sanitizeString to user names may lead to the removal of special characters, potentially affecting expected results.

What is the expected behavior here? Should we exclude apostrophes and hyphens in this case? Maybe something like this:

StringUtils.normalizeAccents(text).replace(/['-]/g, '');

What do you think? @c3024

[c3024]

@nyomanjyotisa

However, applying StringUtils.sanitizeString to user names may lead to the removal of special characters, potentially affecting expected results.

If we use sanitizeString in place of normalizeAccents at all places in the filterReports function, it should not be a problem, right?

The search seems to work fine after replacing with sanitizeString.

Screen.Recording.2025-01-07.at.9.29.25.PM.mov

[nyomanjyotisa]

Sanitizing the searchTerms with StringUtils.sanitizeString could impact the expected search results, especially when users search for phone numbers, or usernames that contain special characters or numbers. This method removes diacritical marks, non-alphabetic characters, and non-Latin characters, potentially altering the intended query and causing some test cases to fail. Below is a comparison of different scenarios:

Searching for an incomplete phone number using normalizeString

Searching for an incomplete phone number using sanitizeString

Searching for a numbered username using normalizeString

Searching for a numbered username using sanitizeString

It displayed all the recent users.

Apostrophes are not considered as accents or diacritics, they are treated as special characters. If we want to address this, we can use an approach like in this comment to remove apostrophes.

[c3024]

@nyomanjyotisa
Good catch! We can have phone numbers as well in chat search so we cannot use sanitizeString. Personally, I think let us just use normalizeAccents and remove only the accents or diacritics and let the apostrophes stay. Then "D'Alembert" does not return results for "DAlembert" but I think that is okay because the user can easily search with the term with apostrophe like "D'Alembert" with the usual English keyboard and this gets the relevant results.

@MonilBhavsar , what do you think?

[MonilBhavsar]

It's fair that user can type apostrophe easily on a keyboard, but I think we should definitely return results for D'Alembert if user just typed DAlembert

[c3024]

@nyomanjyotisa

Let's do this like you suggested.

StringUtils.normalizeAccents(text).replace(/['-]/g, '');

[nyomanjyotisa]

Let's do this like you suggested.

The PR has been updated!
For the ESLint check, should we address the namespace import errors for ReportActionsUtils and ReportUtils in this PR? or would it be better to disable them using eslint-disable-next-line no-restricted-syntax, considering their extensive usage in this file?

[c3024]

I think we should make the changes and not suppress the lint error. There are many places to change but the change is simple enough that nothing should break IMO.

[nyomanjyotisa]

PR updated @c3024

[c3024]

Could you add a test for text containing ' and -?