Duplicates and case sensitivity

[Constituer]

Hello.

Is it possible to search for duplicate notes in a case insensitive manner? Either during the import process or when using the Find duplicates tool?

[ShadyMedic]

I think this is intentionally not implemented, because it would be very resource-intensive. Each card in your collection would need to be converted into lowercase (or uppercase) and compared with every card in the import (also converted to the same case). If you had 10,000 cards in your collection and would be importing 100 cards, it would sum up to:

• 10,000 operations – converting the collection
• 100 operations – converting the cards
• 100 × 10,000 = 1,000,000 operations – comparing the cards
  = 1,010,100 operations

Considering that a big portion of Anki is written in Python, which is not a particularly fast language, this would impact the usability quite a lot.

[Constituer]

I don’t think adding .lower() to the find_duplicates function would add a noticeable delay to it. In any case it could be limited to the Find Duplicates tool and be optional.