<p>Most likely, you're not using a charset/collation that supports Mandarin characters, and MySQL's full-text search (like the <code>MATCH</code> query Craft uses and you shared) is very charset/collation specific.</p>
<p><a href="https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/faqs-cjk.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/faqs-cjk.html</a></p>
<p>At a minimum, you'll want to update the <code>searchindex</code> table to a collation that supports, those characters, but you'll likely want to audit other Craft tables/columns that store them as well.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-03-09T05:11:44.227Z
2023-03-09T05:11:44.227Z
Brad Bell
<p>We have a multisite installation that has Mandarin as one of its languages, and searches do not work at all for that site. Looking into it, it seems to be an issue with how Craft runs the SQL queries, specifically</p>
<pre class="lang-sql prettyprint-override"><code>MATCH (`keywords`) AGAINST('+科技*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
</code></pre>
<p>This returns zero results, but if I change it to</p>
<pre class="lang-sql prettyprint-override"><code>keywords LIKE '科技'
</code></pre>
<p>it will return the expected results. Is there a way around this at all?</p>

<search>
Searching with foreign charcters
# Searching with foreign charcters

(Asked by: username_0 on 2023-03-08)

We have a multisite installation that has Mandarin as one of its languages, and searches do not work at all for that site. Looking into it, it seems to be an issue with how Craft runs the SQL queries, specifically
MATCH (`keywords`) AGAINST('+科技*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)

This returns zero results, but if I change it to
keywords LIKE '科技'

it will return the expected results. Is there a way around this at all?

**Tags:** search

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2023-03-09. Score: 1

Most likely, you're not using a charset/collation that supports Mandarin characters, and MySQL's full-text search (like the `MATCH` query Craft uses and you shared) is very charset/collation specific.

<https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/faqs-cjk.html>

At a minimum, you'll want to update the `searchindex` table to a collation that supports, those characters, but you'll likely want to audit other Craft tables/columns that store them as well.


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