How to make jQuery Chosen disregard accentuation at the time of the search?

I suggest you use the select2 that has the same purpose, with a very similar layout, which already does what you do want, and still provides an option for you to programmatically change the search code.

This library does not offer any easy option to customize the search ... I tried reading the first source code in GitHub ( they are in CoffeeScript, language that I do not master) later on the downloaded file (% with%), and I identified the part where he does the actual search:

AbstractChosen.prototype.winnow_results = function() {
  ...
  searchText = this.get_search_text();
  escapedSearchText = searchText.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.,\^$|#\s]/g, "\$&");
  regexAnchor = this.search_contains ? "" : "^";
  regex = new RegExp(regexAnchor + escapedSearchText, 'i');
  ...
  for (_i = 0, _len = _ref.length; _i < _len; _i++) {
      ...
        option.search_match = this.search_string_match(option.search_text, regex);
        ...
            startpos = option.search_text.search(zregex);
            text = option.search_text.substr(0, startpos + searchText.length) + '</em>' + option.search_text.substr(startpos + searchText.length);
            option.search_text = text.substr(0, startpos) + '<em>' + text.substr(startpos);

My first attempt was to modify the chosen.jquery.js to ignore the accent. For this, I took the instance of get_search_text and replaced the method:

var Chosen = $("#meu-select").chosen().data("chosen");

var get_search_text = Chosen.get_search_text;
Chosen.get_search_text = function() {
    return replaceSpecialChars(get_search_text.apply(this));
};

(the Chosen function came from this @Leonardo Cardoso answer ; it is not complete for a version definite accompany the related question )

The search term now ignores the accent. The next step would be to ignore the term being searched as well. For this, I similarly modified the replaceSpecialChars :

var search_string_match = Chosen.search_string_match;
Chosen.search_string_match = function(search_string, regex) {
    return search_string_match(replaceSpecialChars(search_string), regex);
}

Here is the result (see code at the end). It works, but the problem is that when it comes to highlighting the searched term, it has problems - since the original regex does not match the original term. By the code above, I can not see a way to get search_string_match in a way that does not cause this problem, but when I have a while I look at it again. For now, it's a partial answer ... ( Edit: I gave up!) If I want to continue from where I left off, investigate the replaceSpecialChars method. directly ...)