C# NOT escaping search operators in Lucene query

Question

According to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/query-lucene-syntax special charachters should be escaped:

Special characters that require escaping include the following: + - & |? ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ *: : \ /

The issue is that some of them are search operators: + - | ".

Same issue with quotations marks ". I need to distinguish case when they are operators: "banking account" and banking account (without quotations) are 2 different queries.

And for example quotations could be inches: ten" (ten inches).

Would be nice to have like this:

string searchPhrase = banking -account // no need to escape because "-" is a search operator

string searchPhrase = "banking :-\) sucks" // needed to escape because "-" is not a search operator

string searchPhrase = bank "account opening" // no needed to escape 

string searchPhrase = 100\" // inches not a search operator must be escaped

Written above was tested with search query against Azure search index:

"search=banking -account" and "search=banking \-account" (with escaped "-")produce different number of results.

Is there a way to programmatically decide when special charachter needs escaping or am I missing something obvious here?

Answer 1

If you are using standard.lucence most of the special characters will act as a delimiter. And you data will not indexed along with special character. You can refer this link and test how your data is indexed using different analyzer.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/searchservice/test-analyzer

Are you expecting the user to enter operators? If not you can escape all the special character that user enters.