On 29 May 2017, Sphider versions 1.5.4 and 1.5.4-PDO will be released and posted on our Downloads page.
Although addressed in the 1.5.3 series, table prefixes containing a hyphen continued to be a problem. Hopefully this time we have tracked down ALL the sources of this problem and corrected them.
Another problem was that the presence of an emoji on a web page (generally uncommon except on blog or forum pages) would cause an error and that page would not be indexed. Emojis are now purged before indexing.
The ability to index decimal numbers has been added. In earlier versions, numbers could be indexed but decimals numbers would be not be. For example, ‘12345.56789’ would be indexed as ‘12345’ and ‘56789’. If the setting for indexing decimals (on the settings page) is checked, ‘12345.56789’ will now be correctly indexed. A side benefit is ANY numerical string with a period will be recognized. For example ‘123.456.789’ would be indexed. This could be useful for pages containing part numbers. The mixing of numeric and alpha characters will still omit the period. ‘12345.abcde’ will still be indexed separately as ‘12345’ and ‘abcde’.
Also changed in these versions are the language files. Since the search page is utf-8 compliant, “special characters” like è or ç would fail to display properly. The Cyrillic alphabet with characters such as Ц or й will also now display correctly. This does NOT mean the text displayed will be the proper translation, as I am no linguist and am either relying on the work of others where possible, or winging it with the use of Google translate. Simply put, these characters are now coded in the language files as unicode entities.