Feature request: Allow searching for names with diacritics using "regular" characters

[danielcompton]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

I use the gh CLI to open PRs for review by coworkers. I like the feature where you can add reviewers from the CLI. I work with some coworkers whose names have diacritics, e.g. Miķelis, Klāvs, Dāvis.

When I try and search for their name in the CLI, I will type something like:

? Reviewers Mi  [Use arrows to move, space to select, <right> to all, <left> to none, type to filter]
> [ ]  testuser (Miķelis Test)

When I then type k, the person's name disappears from the list:

? Reviewers Mik  [Use arrows to move, space to select, <right> to all, <left> to none, type to filter]

Proposed solution

Allow searching for names with diacritics using "regular" characters. This will help users who have names that aren't "regular" names. I would expect when I type mik, this would match a user named Miķelis.

[mislav]

Thanks for the feature request! I'm fully on board with this. 👍

Notes for would-be implementers

Wherever we instantiate a survey.Select or survey.MultiSelect, there is an implicit filtering functionality as provided by the Survey library. The default filter just matches on exact substrings and has an implementation similar or identical to:

&survey.Select{
	Filter: func(filterValue, optValue string, index int) bool {
		filterValue = strings.ToLower(filterValue)
		return strings.Contains(strings.ToLower(optValue), filterValue)
	},
}

To make it happen that a letter k when filtering would match ķ or that a would match ā, for example, Unicode runes in optValue should be transliterated to their Latin equivalents. Searching Go packages for "transliterate" and picking a trustworthy repo would be the way to go, in my opinion. Note that transliteration is a hard problem and that not all written scripts in the world might be covered by a single library.

Then, a Filter func with transliteration capabilities should be passed to places where we instantiate survey.Select or survey.MultiSelect within our codebase.

[danielcompton]

@benjlevesque thanks very much for working on this! I'm using gh 2.29.0 but I still seem to be getting the old behaviour here:

$ gh --version
gh version 2.29.0 (2023-05-10)
https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v2.29.0
gh pr create
Warning: 2 uncommitted changes

? Reviewers mi  [Use arrows to move, space to select, <right> to all, <left> to none, type to filter]
> [ ]  testuser (Miķelis test)

if I then type k, the remaining name disappears:

? Reviewers mik  [Use arrows to move, space to select, <right> to all, <left> to none, type to filter]

Does the LatinMatchingFilter need to be applied somewhere else as well?

[benjlevesque]

@danielcompton I think you are right, the filter should probably be applied here:

cli/pkg/cmd/pr/shared/survey.go

Line 168 in 9846af1

Options: extraFieldsOptions,

I'm having trouble testing since I don't share a repo with someone with diacritics in their username, would you mind testing?

Prompt: &survey.MultiSelect{
  Message: "What would you like to add?",
  Options: extraFieldsOptions,
  Filter:  prompter.LatinMatchingFilter, // add this
},

[mislav]

@benjlevesque Feel free to open a PR, even if you are unable to test this. Yes, the LatinMatchingFilter should be applied to all survey prompts within the function that you've linked. I have asked for that here

[benjlevesque]

Done here, @mislav 👍
I've found 4 places where I think it makes sense. Let me know if you think I missed others.

I was able to perform a test on labels with accents.