ElasticSearch - Searching with hyphens

Question

Elastic Search 1.6

I want to index text that contains hyphens, for example U-12, U-17, WU-12, t-shirt... and to be able to use a \"Simple Query String\" query to sea

Answer 1

the Quote from Igor Motov is true, you have to add "analyze_wildcard":true, in order to make it worked with regex. But it is important to notice that the hyphen actually tokenizes "u-12" in "u" "12", two separated words.

if preserve the original is important do not use Mapping char filter. Otherwise is kind of useful.

Imagine that you have "m0-77", "m1-77" and "m2-77", if you search m*-77 you are going to have zero hits. However you can remplace "-" (hyphen) with AND in order to connect the two separed words and then search m* AND 77 that is going to give you a correct hit.

you can do it in the client front.

In your problem u-*

{
  "query":{
    "simple_query_string":{
      "query":"u AND 1*",
      "analyze_wildcard":true
    }
  }
}

t-sh*

  {
      "query":{
        "simple_query_string":{
          "query":"t AND sh*",
          "analyze_wildcard":true
        }
      }
    }

Answer 2

If anyone is still looking for a simple workaround to this issue, replace hyphen with underscore _ when indexing data.

For eg, O-000022334 should indexed as O_000022334.

When searching, replace underscore back to hyphen again when displaying results. This way you can search for "O-000022334" and it will find a correct match.

Answer 3

The answer is really simple:

Quote from Igor Motov: Configuring the standard tokenizer

By default the simple_query_string query doesn't analyze the words with wildcards. As a result it searches for all tokens that start with i-ma. The word i-mac doesn't match this request because during analysis it's split into two tokens i and mac and neither of these tokens starts with i-ma. In order to make this query find i-mac you need to make it analyze wildcards:

{
  "_source":true,
  "query":{
    "simple_query_string":{
      "query":"u-1*",
      "analyze_wildcard":true,
      "default_operator":"AND"
    }
  }
}