Looking for a name with special character

Question

Hi Gurus,
In our HR system we use multiple language (eg: polish, french, german, english, finns, ...).  All those languages have some specific characters, like german with ß.
When we use the search help to looking for someone, it seems that only people who have the special character on their keyboard can find directly the correct name.
For example :
If I use a german keyboard I can found an employe by completed the correct last name wich contain eg ß .
if I don t use a german keyboard I have to put a * where the specific characters is.
I would like to know if somehow it were possible to customize the system in order to do not need to enter a * but the correspondant singular letter.  Is there any function for converting a special character to a singular one to activated ?
Thank you for all your help
Best regards
Hadrien

Answer 1

indexOf() is used to find where a character or substring appears in a
given string. What you probably need is charAt() which finds out which
character is at a given position. Like this:private JTextField reportNameText;
// something needs to be put in the text field here
String reportName = reportNameText.getText();
if(reportName.charAt(0) == ' ') {
        // printing a space isn't a lot of good...
    //System.out.println("first character is"+reportName.indexOf(0));
    System.out.println("first character is a space");
    JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,"Report Name should not start with Space", "", JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE);
}An even better condition might beif(Character.isWhitespace(reportName.charAt(0))) {This checks for other sorts of space.
The String methods are described here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/String.html