[ckan-dev] solr escaping

Mon Jun 18 11:00:28 UTC 2012

Dear CKAN devs,

We noticed that some search queries produce unexpected search results
in CKAN, due to them containing special characters. For example if you
were to search for "Spend over £25,000 - NHS Leeds" then it would not
come up with the dataset with that exact name. It was excluding
datasets with the word "NHS" due to the dash/minus sign. It works fine
if you escape the minus sign: "Spend over £25,000 \- NHS Leeds".

So in data.gov.uk I've added escaping of such control characters in
our plugin and this useful routine:
http://fragmentsofcode.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/escape-special-characters-for-solrlucene-query/
Perhaps you would consider providing this in CKAN core in future?

I think there is an occasional case when power users would want to use
the special characters - brackets, +, -, boolean operators etc. but
maybe these could be reserved for an 'advanced search' screen?

David