address autocomplete goes berserk when you type spanish characters

[Teo]

Steps to reproduce:

You need a Spanish keyboard (this may happen with some other languages as well).

1. Let's suppose you have a couple of contacts called John Smith and Steve Johnson in your address book
2. Open Thunderbird and click Write to compose a new message
3. In the "To:" field start typing "jo"
4. The autocomplete will show at least two possibilities: John Smith and Steve Johnson, and possibly more if you have more contacts which match
5. Now type a í or ú or ó or á. On a spanish keyboard, this is done by first hitting the "´" key and then hitting the desired vowel key. I guess the issue will exist with any character that is typed by hitting a sequence of keys

Expected: the typed character (e.g. í) should appear, so you have typed "joí", so any autocomplete suggestions should disappear (unless you have any name starting with joí in your contacts)

Observed: autocomplete automatically chooses "John Smith" as if you had hit the TAB or ENTER key.

Note that the characters í, á, ó, etc work perfectly fine in my system and I can write them without issue, (even in Thunderbird when I am writing the body of the message) except for this issue.

Strangely enough, this happens in most cases but not always. For example, I have a few contacts whose name start with "sa" (none of them with "saí"), but if I type "saí" it behaves as expected. However most examples I test do reproduce the issue. I haven't been able to narrow down the exact pattern.

A real life example:
I had to write to a person called Elías which I thought I had in the address book but I didn't. In my address book I have a "Circuito Electrovisiones", a few "Elena" and an "Elisabetta". So I typed "elí"... While typing "el" the expected options appeared automatically in the list, but as soon as I got to "elí" it immediately selected "Circuito Electrovisiones" (and added a í at the end after the email address) which does not contain the "elí" pattern at all.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: thunderbird 3.1.11+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.10.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-30.54-generic 2.6.35.13
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-30-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Jul 18 19:32:08 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: thunderbird

[William Ranvaud (wiranvaud)]

This is really strange but I confirm it happens. The worse of it all is that it's not consistent, sometimes it will work fine, sometimes it will finish auto-completion and append the accented character at the end of the auto-completed email...
To reproduce:
I have created 3 contacts: nuñez, nuria and nurlu. When I type nu+(accent that DO NOT correspond to any contact of my list: í ì etc.) sometimes it will let me finish writing a new email others it will enter one of the existing mails and add the accented letter at the end.

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner.

If this is still an issue using a maintained version of Thunderbird then please let us know otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for thunderbird (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]