Shotnest · Library
Find an accented word from an unaccented query
A query for cafe finds Café because Shotnest strips Latin and Vietnamese accent marks before matching, while the record keeps its original spelling.
How accents are folded before matching
Both the search tool on this page and the Shotnest app run the same normalization before comparing text. Letters are lowercased, then a fixed table replaces accented Latin letters with plain ones: é becomes e, ç becomes c, ş becomes s, ø becomes o. A second table does the same for Vietnamese vowels, so Đà Nẵng is compared as da nang. A few letters expand instead of shrinking: ß and ẞ become ss, æ becomes ae and the ligature fi becomes fi.
Only the comparison copy is folded. The record you typed, and in the app the text read from the screenshot, keeps its accents, so the result still shows Café. Folding happens on both sides, which is why the upper-case query CAFÉ returns the same record as cafe.
Try the original example
- Supplied records
- Café opening notes — Library reference
- Query
- cafe
- Matching record numbers
- 1
Search a name you only half remember
- Type the word the way it comes to mind, with or without accents.
- Check the returned record number against the list you entered.
- Open the original text and copy the spelling from there, not from your query.
- If nothing matches, try one distinctive part of the word instead of the whole phrase.
- Query creme brulee in “Crème brûlée recipe”
- match
- Straße after normalization
- strasse
- Đà Nẵng after normalization
- da nang
Where accent folding stops
- Turkish dotted İ is lowercased to i plus a combining dot, which the table does not remove, so istanbul does not find İstanbul in this tool.
- Folding is letter by letter. It does not treat colour and color, or a translated word, as the same text.
- Greek and Hebrew letters are not in the table, and the app's on-device text recognition cannot read those scripts yet, so a Latin-letter name or a number is the better query there.
- Arabic letter variants are unified and short-vowel marks are dropped by a separate mapping, so that behaviour should not be read as accent folding for every script.
Keep the original spelling
A folded match tells you the letters line up once accents are removed. It does not tell you which spelling is correct for a person or a place, so take names from the returned original. In the app, the same rule lets a screenshot of a French menu turn up for a query typed on an English keyboard.