GeoNames Forum

I'm sure this must have been raised before but I could not find any refs to it.

There are many locations that contain apostrophes in their names eg St Paul's Cathedral (6618004). Currently searches do not return results if the apostrophe is not included in the search string.

In the short term I could add alternate names for the places I come across, adding an alternate name without the apostrophe, and presumably marking it as colloquial but it would surely be better to do this globally either by engineering the queries so that apostrophes are ignored altogether, or by programatically adding alternate names for all entries with apostrophes.

Of course there may just be some setting I don't know about to do the ignoring already?

Thanks, Stewart.
The best is to handle this in the search function. We are testing an updated version, it will take some time till it is available on all servers.

Best Regards

Marc

One additional but related question, concerning the downloadable geonames data. So far, I've only grabbed one file, GB.txt, and rather than using the apostrophe (U+0027) in location names, it seems to use the right single quotation mark (U+2019). The question is, what's the best way to handle this?

For my own use, I'm going to have to turn them all back into apostrophe, since the database they're going into isn't UTF-8 at this time, but I'm assuming that there's a reason for using the quote mark instead of the apostrophe. I'm not trying to be pedantic, just wondering how I should deal with this when I do convert the database over to UTF-8. Convert any apostrophe into a right single quote in the search string, or convert the data in the table in the other direction? I have to deal with this somehow, or else searching for "Lady's Mile Beach" won't match "Lady’s Mile Beach", which is a slightly different issue than searching for "Ladys Mile Beach".

At this time, the solution I'm favoring is to add aliases with the quote turned into an apostrophe and with the quote mark removed, if I go with a solution that alters the data, or to do something similar to the query string if I want to keep the data as is and deal with it in the search function.

I looked up quotation mark usage on Wikipedia to see if there were any cases where quotation marks might be part of a location name and didn't find anything that looked likely, but I don't consider that definitive, and I'm going to have to deal with the possibility of some client-side smart quote functionality sending quotes even if I do decide that the apostrophe is correct and update the data to use the apostrophe.