Overview
accent-folding is a small open-source utility focused on improving multilingual search experiences.
The library solves a common UX problem in internationalized applications: users often search without typing accents or special characters, while the stored content still contains them.
For example:
- searching for “Malaga” should match “Málaga”
- “Jose” should match “José”
- “Sao Paulo” should match “São Paulo”
The package normalizes strings for accent-insensitive matching while preserving the original text for display and highlighting.
Why I Built It
I originally built accent-folding while working at Liligo on large-scale travel search interfaces.
One recurring UX issue was handling accent-insensitive search inside autocomplete and dropdown components. Users would often type queries like “Malaga”, while the actual destination data contained accented names such as “Málaga”. Matching the result was relatively straightforward, but correctly highlighting the typed search term inside the UI while preserving the original accented text was significantly more complex.
Existing solutions either focused only on normalization or introduced unnecessary complexity for frontend use cases, so I created a lightweight utility specifically designed for practical search matching and highlighting in multilingual applications
Key Features
- Accent-insensitive matching
- Unicode normalization
- Highlight-aware search handling
- Lightweight and dependency-free
- Frontend-friendly API
- TypeScript-compatible package structure.
Engineering Focus
The project focused heavily on correctness and usability rather than complexity.
Important considerations included:
- preserving original string positions for UI highlighting,
- avoiding unnecessary processing overhead,
- handling edge cases across multiple languages,
- and keeping the API intentionally simple.
The goal was to create a utility that could integrate naturally into autocomplete systems, filters, search inputs, and admin interfaces without introducing additional complexity.
Outcome
The package became a reusable building block for multilingual search experiences and represents the kind of engineering problems I enjoy solving: small but universal UX issues that significantly improve real-world usability.
It also reflects my broader frontend philosophy: building practical, focused tools that improve product quality through attention to detail.