Can I define which word breakers to use when building a mssql fulltext index?

Question

I have created a fulltext catalog that stores the data from some of the columns in a table, but the contents seem to have been split apart by characters that I don\'t really

Answer 1

Full text indexes only consider the characters _ and ` while indexing. All the other characters are ignored and the words get split where these characters occur. This is mainly because full text indexes are designed to index large documents and there only proper words are considered to make it a more refined search.

We faced a similar problem. To solve this we actually had a translation table, where characters like @,-, / were replaced with special sequences like '`at`','`dash`','`slash`' etc. While searching in the full text, u've to again replace ur characters in the search string with these special sequences and search. This should take care of the special characters.

Answer 2

The ability to configure FTS indexing is fairly limited out of the box. I don't think that you can use languages to do this.

If you are up for a challenge, and have access to some C++ knowledge, you can always write a custom IFilter implementation. It's not trivial, but not too difficult. See here for IFilter resources.