No results for "M&M", but results for "M&"

[tomclayson92]

One of the main product we expect to be selling is M&M’s (the chocolate candy). When users search for this however, no results appear. If I search for just “M&”, then it works correctly. Why might this be?

[tomclayson92]

This appears to be happening due to WPML’s treatment of the ‘&’ character. Searching for M&M works correctly, but obviously no user will know that. I have had similar issues with WPML before, and they haven’t been helpful, so is there any way to convert characters like & into ‘&’ before searching if a translated language is being used?

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi,

Sure, I think we can do something about this. The issue seems to be indeed the ‘&’ character storage as HTML entity. There is this knowledge base article, that allows replacement of some characters with others. In your case the code will be:

This should hopefully do the trick.

[tomclayson92]

Thanks for the snippet, but that hasn’t quite seemed to work. It is replacing the character, but still no search results, and now the original ‘M&’ search, which was working, has also stopped working.

[Ernest Marcinko]

At the moment, I am seeing results like so: https://i.imgur.com/TX3ta4k.png
Was there any change anywhere?

[tomclayson92]

With the same query, I don’t get any results. I didn’t change anything to do with the search yesterday.

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi,

I see the issue now, it is not the ‘&’ character, but the apostrophe.

Searching for:

M&M’s

..returns results, but searching:

M&M's

..does not. It’s a different apostrophe character. Assuming that every apostrophe is stored like that, I would suggest this custom code then:

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; 
}

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