Handling Diacritical Marked Text

[Das Goravani]

Thanks Ben. In my case, I will be serving the world with my online chart service, and they have to input the city of birth, so I have a complete world atlas in the software, I am very international, more than most people. If you deal with people around the world, you find they sometimes know diacritical marks better than common ascii latin phrasing and spelling.. they’re lost without them in other words… Brazil for example.  All Arabic Middle Eastern Africa lots of Asia… expect to be able to enter things with the marks and have it work for in their countries it does is their experience.. Originally in my product, with my Atlas 1.0, I stripped all diacritical marks thinking I was making it easier for everybody.. then I learned.. this time I want to keep them if possible and they will be going into queries.. in fact one of the major things I have to deal with are these files.. it’s a major part of what I do.. so I’ll be careful to quote text LOL and use what are they called.. the @ symbol.. escapes me right now.. bind variables.. yes.. I’ll use those.. 

Working with this data this time, it’s a bigger more complete database this time, it’s a real joy because ALL the colors of mankind come out in the lists if you look at them.. like scanning the “states” file it goes by country of course and alphabetically you get very different countries one after the other, and the names, are so colorful, you can get a sense of the culture from the names.. well I am tripping on this data.. it blows my mind that there are 1.7 million cities on earth, that’s 4000 people per city… not much.. means there are cities in this database with just a few people in them, because most people are in big cities.  1.7 million cities you’d have to visit to have visited every city.  Ha. 5000 divisions “states”, the US Gov calls them “Admins” as they are all different names but what they are is administrative divisions of a country.  There are 400 countries roughly breaking up into 5000 admins breaking up into 1.7 million cities and towns breaking up into 8 billion people, 1 earth.