The only option I can see is to do this in Doctrine_Search_Query::query()

$text = Doctrine_Inflector::unaccent($text);

I am not sure about doing this though. What do you think?

I don't think that that's a good idea since it breaks the UTF8 analyzer. I would refactor the analyzers to include a method like normalize(). Those methods could then be called in the analyzers analyze() method.

Doctrine_Search_Analyzer_Standard::normalize($text, $encoding = $null) would look as follows:

public function normalize($text, $encoding = null) 
{ 
  $text = preg_replace('/[\'`�"]/', '', $text); 
  $text = Doctrine_Inflector::unaccent($text); 
  $text = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9]/', ' ', $text); 
  $text = str_replace('  ', ' ', $text); 

  return strtolower(trim($text));
}

Doctrine_Search_Analyzer_Utf8::normalize($text, $encoding = $null) would look as follows:

public function normalize($text, $encoding = null) 
{ 
  if (is_null($encoding)) { 
    $encoding = isset($this->_options['encoding']) ? $this->_options['encoding']:'utf-8'; 
  } 

  // check that $text encoding is utf-8, if not convert it 
  if (strcasecmp($encoding, 'utf-8') != 0 && strcasecmp($encoding, 'utf8') != 0) { 
    $text = iconv($encoding, 'UTF-8', $text); 
  } 

  $text = preg_replace('/[^\p{L}\p{N}]+/u', ' ', $text); 
  $text = str_replace('  ', ' ', $text); 

  return mb_strtolower(trim($text), 'UTF-8');
}

This would then also allow to remove some code duplication in the analyze() method. It could be changed to the following code in Doctrine_Search_Analyzer_Standard and could be completely removed in Doctrine_Search_Analyzer_Utf8:

public function analyze($text, $encoding = null)
{
  $text = $this->normalize($text, $encoding);

  $terms = explode(' ', $text);

  $ret = array();
  if ( ! empty($terms)) {
      foreach ($terms as $i => $term) {
          if (empty($term)) {
              continue;
          }

          if (in_array($lower, self::$_stopwords)) {
              continue;
          }

          $ret[$i] = $lower;
      }
  }
  return $ret;
}

Finally the normalize() method is called in Doctrine_Search_Query::query(). Unfortunately I have no idea how to call it there!?
What do you think?

At first this seems like a good solution but I realized it will break things even more. We allow wildcards and certain keywords in the query string. *, OR, AND, etc. If we were to run the normalize() method on the query text it would break all that functionality.

Well.. that's nowhere documented.. the only thing I found was

Doctrine_Search provides a query language similar to Apache Lucene. The Doctrine_Search_Query converts human readable, easy-to-construct search queries to their complex DQL equivalents which are then converted to SQL like normal.

So I would rather break those special things than to have the search missing existing items. But maybe there's a better place to call that normalize() - perhaps where the query is analyzed and converted to a DQL statement. It should be possible there to run normalize on every search term.

That's what this means:

Doctrine_Search provides a query language similar to Apache Lucene

You can do things like

$query->query('some text* OR some more test*');

If we normalized each term/word it will still remove those wildcards. That is what query language similar to Apache lucene means.

What do you think about this solution?
class ErpSearchAnalizer extends Doctrine_Search_Analyzer_Standard {
public function analyze($text, $encoding = null) {
$text = preg_replace('/[\'`�"]/', '', $text);
$text = Doctrine_Inflector::unaccent($text);
// for * search
//$text = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9]/', ' ', $text);
$text = str_replace(' ', ' ', $text);
$terms = explode(' ', $text);

$ret = array();
if (!empty($terms)) {
foreach ($terms as $i => $term) {
if (empty($term))

$ret[$i] = $lower;
}
}
return $ret;
}
}
to make a search like this
$analize = new ErpSearchAnalizer();
$val_user = $analizar->analyze($val_user);
$tempresult = $table->search(implode(" ", $val_user));

will it work?