Ligatures and umlauts in Sphinx search

Question

I have a list of names with ligatures and umlauts (using Sphinx). Try to search "Æther" give me a result. But i want to have an ability to search these names with replaced ligatures as "Aether" for example.

Can Sphinx do it automatically?

Answer 1

umlauts, can be dealt with directly by charset_table http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#conf-charset-table

Alas there is no easy way to just tell sphinx to index everything, needs an explicit charset_table setup to your own requirements. This is perhaps http://sphinxsearch.com/forum/view.html?id=9312 the best starting point

ligatures, is more trickly because its not a one-to-one mapping. I think regexp_filter, would be the best way to deal with these http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#conf-regexp-filter