Request: strip hyphens when searching for sentence on Tatoeba

[alanf_us]

Clozemaster has a really nice feature that lets you select the words of a sentence and find the corresponding sentence on Tatoeba. However, wth this sentence:

Молодёжь знает правила, а старики - исключения.

the search didn’t work unless I stripped out the dash (a simple hyphen) from the search field once I landed on Tatoeba. The problem is that several punctuation marks have meanings in Manticore, the search engine used by Tatoeba. A hyphen is one of them: it indicates that sentences containing the following word should not be matched.

Since Clozemasters (or whatever you want to call people who hang out at Clozemaster) will probably never want to use these special marks when they’re searching Tatoeba for a sentence they’ve just selected, would it make sense to strip out all punctuation before a search?

[morbrorper]

I concur with your request. But even so, there are some sentences at Tatoeba that cannot be found using the simple search interface, since they are either “orphans” or “unapproved”. This is quite common among the sentences in the Japanese FFT.

Let me therefore point out that the browser interface has a nice feature that is much more reliable than the search: hidden in the Report Error dialog, there is a direct link to the phrase over at Tatoeba.

It is a long-standing request of mine that this feature be made available also in the Android app. @mike ?