Escape reserved characters

[intranets-talk]

Hi,
I've managed to set up Plastic as per documentation info - and works fine, thank you.

I'm having a issue where using ES "reserved characters" in queries throws a BadRequest400Exception - query_shard_exception: Failed to parse query. Example: searching for test: throws out the mentioned exception.

I am aware that this is more of a ES related issue, not Plastic's but I was wondering how others managed to get around this. Is query sanitation required, or do I need to use some regex? I know I can catch the exception, but I rather not.

Example of how I am building the query:

Attachment::search()->querystring('*' . $query . '*' , ['fields' => ['name^4', 'file_slug', 'path', 'extension', 'size']])->size(15)->get()->hits();     

The ES reserved characters are listed here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#_reserved_characters

[sleimanx2]

Yes as per the documentation not escaping the reserved characters could lead to a syntax error. I'm still not sure if escaping those characters automatically is a good idea. Do you have any insights?

[intranets-talk]

Agree, escaping the reserved characters it's probably not the way to go, and playing with this can render inaccurate search results.

What I am doing right now is allowing some of the characters (which I believe are "most used"), like + : - &, and escape the rest by using preg_replace . Those only throw the exception if a wildcard is used in query (within the controller, like in my example above). So I have removed the wildcards from the query.

This takes away some of the ES functionality, but I have nothing better so far. At least this way, I get accurate results.

Also, in this scenario I am still getting an exception error if no term is used after the search operator (for example: test + will throw the error and test +foo will parse fine). I am also catching this error.

Since ES plugs in quite a few languages, I guess it is up to the programmer to deal with search operators in queries.

I believe that this can be closed, is it not as issue with Plastic, but a request for info. Thanks again.