[ckan-dev] solr escaping

Fri Jun 22 10:20:50 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?

Sounds like an excellent suggestion to me. I've made this into a ticket:

http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/2585