Search bar to ignore spaces

Hi,

Well, with a simple custom code it is possible to remove the spaces from the phrase, so the search term “2020 Case 1” becomes “2020Case1”. Based on this knowledge base, the code is:

add_filter('asp_search_phrase_before_cleaning', 'asp_replace_characters', 10, 1);
add_filter('asp_query_args', 'asp_replace_characters', 10, 1);

function asp_replace_characters( $s ) {
  $characters = " "; // Type characters one after another
  $replace_with = '';     // Replace them with this (space by default)

  if ( is_array($s) ) {
    if ( isset($s['s']) && !$s['_ajax_search'] ) 
      $s['s'] = str_replace(str_split($characters), $replace_with, $s['s']);      
  } else {
    $s = str_replace(str_split($characters), $replace_with, $s);
  }

  return $s; 
}

Hi Alison,

In this specific case, does the keyword “2019Case1” exist somewhere in the post content or in the selected fields? If it does not exist, then this is not going to be possible.
All that code does is removes the spaces from the phrases entered, and then matches the resulting keyword agains the selected fields.

I think what you mean is somehow detecting when the user did not enter the spaces and account for them – basically the other way around. Unfortunately that is not possible. There is no way to tell from the code perspective where the spaces should be, and trying all the variations would simply overload the server within seconds.