Configuring the tokanisation of the search term in an elasticsearch query

Question

I am doing a general search against elasticsearch (1.7) using a match query against a number of specified fields. This is done in a java app with one box to enter search terms in. Various search options are allowed (for example surrounding phrase with quotes to look for the phase not the component words). This means I am doing full test searches.

All is well except my account refs have forward slashes in them and a search on an account ref produces thousands of results. If I surround the account ref with quotes I get just the result I want. I assume an account ref of AC/1234/A01 is searching for [AC OR 1234 OR A01]. Initially I thought this was a regex issue but I don't think it is.

I raised a similar question a while ago and one suggestion which I had thought worked was to add "analyzer": "keyword" to the query (in my code

queryStringQueryBuilder.analyzer("keyword")

).

The problem with this is that many of the other fields searched are not keyword and it is stopping a lot of flexible search options working (case sensitivity etc). I assume this has become something along the lines of an exact match in the text search.

I've looked at this the wrong way around for a while now and as I see it I can't fix it in the index or even in the general analyser settings as even if the account ref field is tokenised and analysed perfectly for my requirement the search will still search all the other fields for [AC OR 1234 OR A01].

Is there a way of configuring the search query to not split the account number on forward slashes? I could test ignoring all punctuation if it is possible to only split by whitespaces although I would prefer not to make such a radical change...

So I guess what I am asking is whether there is another built in analyzer which would still do a full full text search but would not split the search term up using punctuation ? If not is this something I could do with a custom analyzer (without applying it to the index itself ?)

Thanks.

Answer 1

The simplest way to do it is by replacing / with some character that doesn't cause the word to be split in two tokens, but doesn't interfere with your other terms ( _ , . , ' should work) or remove / completely using mapping char filter . There is a similar example here https://stackoverflow.com/a/23640832/783043