# Ferret for professionals

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-for-professionals/113587>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 2, 2007, 12:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-for-professionals/113587 "2007-09-02T12:05:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![demoversion](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@demoversion](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/demoversion)\
**Post date:** [September 2, 2007, 12:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-for-professionals/113587/1 "2007-09-02T12:05:41Z")

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Hello,

I’m trying to setup ferret search engine(what i did successfully for  
searching english phrases, words)

But i doesn’t work for UTF-8 symbols!!!

I tried to find the solution for this problem:

1. i add to enviroment.rb followinf lines:  
ENV[‘LANG’] = ‘de\_DE.UTF-8@euro’  
ENV[‘LC\_TIME’] = ‘C’  
require ‘acts\_as\_ferret’
2. next i using scaffold added few posts(my model, that i index this  
way:  
acts\_as\_ferret :fields =\> [:name, :post]

English phrases searching well, but for german it get empty result  
array.

I don’t know what to do, so I asked to professional, who do this!!

Thanks for your replies!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![demoversion](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@demoversion](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/demoversion)\
**Post date:** [September 2, 2007, 12:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-for-professionals/113587/2 "2007-09-02T12:53:07Z")

</div>

Igor K. wrote:

> I’m trying to setup ferret search engine(what i did successfully for  
> searching english phrases, words)
> 
> But i doesn’t work for UTF-8 symbols!!!
> 
> I tried to find the solution for this problem:
> 
> 1. i add to enviroment.rb followinf lines:  
> ENV[‘LANG’] = ‘de\_DE.UTF-8@euro’  
> ENV[‘LC\_TIME’] = ‘C’  
> require ‘acts\_as\_ferret’
> 2. next i using scaffold added few posts(my model, that i index this  
> way:  
> acts\_as\_ferret :fields =\> [:name, :post]
> 
> English phrases searching well, but for german it get empty result  
> array.

Try mapping special characters to their base characters. See  
[Should "a" match "ä" in ferret? - Ferret - Ruby-Forum](http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/121438) for a recent discussion on the  
Ferret mailing list about this.

–  
Roderick van Domburg  
[http://www.nedforce.com](http://www.nedforce.com)