As per 2026-02 Rules and Standards discussion (see "Author Names With Spaces"), regular searches on Names, Series, Publication Series, Magazines, Publishers, and Awards should ignore punctuation and white space. "Fiction Titles" and "All Titles" searches may be a different case due to their use of FULLTEXT searches and will require an additional investigation.
Note that this FR partially overlaps with FR 455, "Allow fuzzy searches". We started implementing the latter in 2018 (see SVN 64), but the implementation apparently assumed that the search box would be modified to have an "Approximate" checkbox. Only one part of SQLParsing.py was modified and the functionality was never made available to end users. Conversely, this FR expects that there would be no new check-boxes. Instead, the default behavior of the regular search algorithm would be modified to ignore punctuation and spaces.
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