Longueuil data projectWhere are the jeux d'eau? A search that fails in French, and the fix
Ville de Longueuil publishes its sports and recreation equipment as open data on Données Québec: 644 rows, from play modules to arenas. We wrote the search an assistant typically produces, tested it with queries people actually type, and fixed it. All code and counts are ours, from the file downloaded on 23 October 2026.
Five test queries, written before the code, against the draft and the folded search (our run on the Ville de Longueuil file, 23 October 2026)| Query as a person types it | What the file actually says | Draft finds | Folded search finds |
|---|
| jeux d'eau | Jeux d’eau, with a curly apostrophe | 0 | 19 |
| petanque | Terrain sportif - Pétanque | 0 | 27 |
| patinoires et sentier glace | Patinoires et sentier glacé | 0 | 47 |
| aréna - olympia | Aréna, two spaces, then - Olympia | 0 | 1 |
| pataugeoire | Pataugeoire | 21 | 21 |
The draft lowercases both sides and looks for the query inside the type and place columns. That is what a quick prompt usually returns, and it passes the one test most people try, a plain word with no accent. It fails on the other four for three different reasons: a curly apostrophe (U+2019) where the user typed a straight one, an accent the user did not type, and a doubled space in the city's own data.
The fix folds both the query and the data the same way before comparing: apostrophes made straight, accents stripped, case and spacing ignored. Here is the whole exercise:# Searching Longueuil's equipment list in French: a naive draft, then a folded search (our teaching example)
import unicodedata
from openpyxl import load_workbook # pip install openpyxl
sheet = load_workbook("equipsportsrecreatifs.xlsx", read_only=True).active
rows = list(sheet.iter_rows(values_only=True))
head, data = rows[0], rows[1:]
TYPE = head.index("Type d'équipement")
PLACE = head.index("Localisation de l'équipement")
def fold(text):
"""Curly apostrophe to straight, accents removed, case and spacing ignored."""
text = unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", (text or "").replace("\u2019", "'"))
text = "".join(ch for ch in text if not unicodedata.combining(ch))
return " ".join(text.lower().split())
def draft_search(query):
return [r for r in data if query.lower() in (r[TYPE] or "").lower() + " " + (r[PLACE] or "").lower()]
def folded_search(query):
return [r for r in data if fold(query) in fold(r[TYPE]) + " " + fold(r[PLACE])]
# The test queries: typed the way people really type them, written down before any code.
QUERIES = ["jeux d'eau", "petanque", "patinoires et sentier glace", "aréna - olympia", "pataugeoire"]
for q in QUERIES:
print(repr(q), "draft", len(draft_search(q)), "folded", len(folded_search(q)))
Write the queries first
The five queries were listed before any code existed, typed the way a Longueuil parent would type them on a phone: no accents, straight apostrophes, single spaces. If the draft had been tested only with pataugeoire, it would have looked correct.
Count the variants
Our count finds 23 type values with a curly apostrophe and 8 with a straight one, and 27 place names with stray or doubled spaces. Folding is not cosmetic; on this file it decides whether a search works at all.
Know what folding costs
Folding can merge values. On this file it turns 261 raw place names into 246, and we checked all 14 merged groups: each is one place written two or three ways, such as Complexe Sportif Longueuil and Complexe sportif Longueuil. Elsewhere accents can separate real words, so test before shipping.
A column that is not what its name says
The column headed Secteur holds a postal code on 637 of the 644 rows. On 6 rows it holds a district name instead (Saint-Hubert four times, Maricourt once and Longueuil once), and one postal code, J4P3K3 on OBJECTID 69, has lost its space. An agent told to group equipment by sector would group by postal code without saying so. Reading the values before trusting the header is the check.
The dataset is Ville de Longueuil's, published on Données Québec under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), which the portal's licence page describes as allowing reuse même à des fins commerciales, that is, even for commercial purposes (dataset, licence). Source: Ville de Longueuil, Équipements sportifs et récréatifs, CC BY 4.0. The city does not endorse this page or our classes.
