#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.

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May 25, 2023 (6 months ago)

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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

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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

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