ICU knows to ignore soft hyphens, so we don't need to replace them before searching. See aso <rdar://problem/9464270>.
Created attachment 228125 [details] proposed patch
Comment on attachment 228125 [details] proposed patch View in context: https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=228125&action=review > Source/WebCore/ChangeLog:3 > + Remove special handling of soft hyphens in search code Why?
> Why? Quoting bug description, "ICU knows to ignore soft hyphens, so we don't need to replace them before searching."
(In reply to comment #3) > > Why? > > Quoting bug description, "ICU knows to ignore soft hyphens, so we don't need to replace them before searching." Ah! Can you put that in the ChangeLog as well?
Committed <http://trac.webkit.org/r166507>.
(In reply to comment #0) > ICU knows to ignore soft hyphens Has that always been true, or is this a recent development?
I've been told that ICU "already" does this, and EWS confirmed that it's true as of 10.8 at least. I think that this code was added before Mac WebKit started to use ICU, and it was recently needed because of other non-ICU platforms that we used to support. This is some history that I'm aware of, although it doesn't fully answer your question.