signalapp / signalapp/Signal-Android

Does not search Chinese, Japanese characters

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#8,629 17 comments 14 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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acknowledged sqlcipher
Dominant language
Kotlin
Stars
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Forks
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PR merge metrics
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Description


Bug description

The new signal search feature does not search Asian Characters. It only search sentence.

Steps to reproduce
  • Have some complete sentences made of Asian Characters.
  • search for individual character
  • search returns no result.

Actual result:

  • search for the whole sentence
  • search return matching result.
  • search return no result for characters or combination of characters

Expected result:
Search should return result for any combination of asian characters. If user searches "word1 word2" in asian characters, it is better to match any conversation where both word1 and word2 appears.

Device info

I beleieve this issue is general for all signal apps because it is built to search only roman words determined by spaces, periods, commas, etc.

Link to debug log

NA, since it is inherent limitation of the search feature implementation.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the search behavior with individual and combined Chinese or Japanese characters, then trace the existing search feature's tokenization and matching entry point. Done means searches for individual characters and combinations return conversations containing them, while the existing whole-sentence search continues to work.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
kotlin
Domain
search
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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