Overview

This chapter lists the alternate spelling conventions Oracle Text uses for German, Danish and Swedish. These languages contain words that have more than one accepted spelling.

When a language has more than one way of spelling a word, Oracle indexes the word in its basic form. For example in German, the basic form of the ä character is ae, and so words containing the ä character are indexed with ae as the substitution.

Oracle also converts query terms to their basic forms before lookup. As a result, users can query words with either spelling.

Enabling Alternate Spelling

You enable alternate spelling by specifying either GERMAN, DANISH, or SWEDISH for the alternate spelling BASIC_LEXER attribute. For example, to enable alternate spelling in German, you can issue the following statements:

begin
ctx_ddl.create_preference('GERMAN_LEX', 'BASIC_LEXER');
ctx_ddl.set_attribute('GERMAN_LEX', 'ALTERNATE_SPELLING', 'GERMAN');
end;

Disabling Alternate Spelling

To disable alternate spelling, use the CTX_DDL.UNSET_ATTRIBUTE procedure as follows:

begin
ctx_ddl.unset_attribute('GERMAN_LEX', 'ALTERNATE_SPELLING');
end;