#community-help

Handling Special Characters in Search Queries

TLDR Sidharth asks how to handle special characters in search queries. Kishore Nallan suggests using symbols_to_index configuration and provides an example to help.

4mo

Join the chat

May 25, 2023 (4 months ago)

Photo of md5-051f535431ff484f44f165e9a0b696a5

Sidharth

10:59 AM

Hello Team,
Is there a way to not pre-process the special characters during search?
Got miss-match while searching a query (a&b) in the documents where one document actually contained the queried string

Photo of md5-4e872368b2b2668460205b409e95c2ea

Kishore Nallan

11:06 AM

You can urlencode the special chars.

11:07

Kishore Nallan

11:07 AM

If you want to actually index them, use the symbols_to_indexconfiguration while creating collection.

Sidharth

12:41 PM

Any reference example for this utility would be very helpful.
https://typesense.org/docs/0.23.1/api/collections.html#schema-parameters

Kishore Nallan

12:43 PM

Sample usage:

curl -k "" -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: ${TYPESENSE_API_KEY}" -d '{
        "name": "docs",
        "fields": [     
          {"name": "title", "type": "string" },
          {"name": "points", "type": "int32" }
        ], "symbols_to_index": ["&"]
      }'

Sidharth

12:44 PM

Thanks Kishore Nallan
We'll try this, thanks

Typesense

Lightning-fast, open source search engine for everyone | Knowledge Base powered by Struct.AI

Indexed 2779 threads (79% resolved)

Join Our Community Manage subscription

Similar Threads

Querying with Special Characters in Collections

Hariharan asked about querying with special characters. Kishore Nallan explained to use `symbols_to_index` configuration while creating the collection.

7mo

Implementing Directory-Specific Search with Typesense

M inquired about doing directory-specific searches using Typesense. Dima suggested storing all path combinations and using it in array filter. Kishore Nallan provided additional Typesense configuration advice to index special characters. M found these solutions helpful.

1mo

Querying Special Characters in Database

robert had difficulty searching for `$` in documents. Jason explained how to include special characters in search indexing.

15mo