Hi mFu !!
How are you doing 😊
Not a bad idea to ignore punctuation, but it will come with undesired side effects, since the actual search is not executed by RMTV but rather by the data provider (TVDB etc).
Example: S.W.A.T. ...
Searching for S.W.A.T. will give the right TV show(s). However, searching for SWAT will not.
Since most of these data providers work with a database, most likely something like MySQL or MariaDB, you could use "%" as a wildcard.
For example search for S%W%A%T - however ... this will only return a (inconsistent) subset of what you would expect.
The only option that would bring up all SWAT variations is by disabling the "Cleanup search results" option.
Keep in mind though that this function is there for a reason haha ...
Give it a try and you'll know what I mean with the goofy results.
For example:
See how most of these raw results do not even have the phrase "SWAT" in their titles or even descriptions?
It is a total mystery why these results are even returned by TVDB (mostly, occasionally TVMaze and TheMovieDB return something goofy as well).
On that note:
The cleanup function removes everything that does not include the search term.
This is very rudimentary due to SQLite limitations. The "%" character can be used for any character(s) and "_" for a character.
Which means that if a result is filter by "%S%W%A%T%", then "S.W.A.T." would be valid, but "Seven Worlds, One Planet" as well.
If I would filter by using "S_W_A_T_" then "SWAT" would fail, but "S.W.A.T." would succeed.
Even if we found a perfect filter for S.W.A.T., then this filter will most likely not work for other search queries.
Unfortunately, there is no wildcard option to select zero or one character.
There is an option to add user defined functions for SQLite, however I never got that to work properly.
--- several hours later --- 🤦🏻♂️
I did manage to make a work around in the 2.1.15 beta ... (link)
Took me some work to work around the database and search results limitations.
Punctuation is not being ignore, so "S.W.A.T." will produce (if search cleanup is enabled) a list of all shows with "S.W.A.T." in it.
However ... if you enter "swat" or "SWAT" then the results will include S.W.A.T. named TV shows.
A little quick fix, but basically what it does, is look for results that have one or no characters in between.
So I basically try to match a pattern S?W?A?T where "?" can optionally be a character.
This may not be super refined of course, but I think it will do for now.
If you run into issues, I cam refine the citeria.
Let me know if this works 😊