title: Character folding for a Django haystack and whoosh
body: <p>I have a django based app with haystack and whoosh search engine. I want to provide an accent and special character independent search so that I can find indexed data with special characters also by using words without special chars:</p>
  
  <p>Indexed is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>'café'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Search term:</p>
  
  <pre><code>'cafe'  
  'café'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've written a provided a specific FoldingWhooshSearchBackend which uses a <code>StemmingAnalyzer</code> and a<code>CharsetFilter(accent_map)</code> as described in the following document:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://gist.github.com/gregplaysguitar/1727204">https://gist.github.com/gregplaysguitar/1727204</a></p>
  
  <p>However the search still doesn't work like expected, i.e. I cannot search with 'cafe' and find 'café'. I've looked into the search index using: </p>
  
  <pre><code>from whoosh.index import open_dir
  ix = open_dir('myservice/settings/whoosh_index')
  searcher = ix.searcher()
  for doc in searcher.documents():
      print doc
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The special characters are still in the index.</p>
  
  <p>Do I have to do something additional? Is is about changing the index template?</p>