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How Portal Search handles special characters when indexing

Portal Search indexes words that are composed of consecutive literals, that is letters, digits and special characters. This section describes how Portal Search handles special characters during indexing.

This includes the following characters:

  • The hash or pound sign ( **\#** ).
  • The percent sign ( **%** ).
  • The plus sign ( **+** ).
  • The asterisk ( **\*** ).

During indexing special characters are handled as follows:

  • Blank or white space; this includes the tab

    Blanks separate words and are not indexed. Example: The string key board is indexed as two separate words key and board.

  • Line break or new line

    Line breaks separate words and are not indexed unless they are preceded by a dash ( - ). Examples:

    • The string

      key 
board

      is indexed as two separate words key and board.

    • The string

      key-
board

      is indexed as one word keyboard.

  • Dot or sentence end period ( . ) and comma ( , )

    Dots and commas separate words and are not indexed, unless they are both preceded and followed by a letter or digit. Example: The string www.ibm.com is indexed as www.ibm.com and not as three separate words.

  • Question mark ( ? ) and exclamation mark ( ! )

    Question marks and exclamation marks separate words and are not indexed unless they are followed by a letter.

  • Other punctuation: ( ) { } [ ] < > ; : / \ | " _ -

    These characters separate words and are not indexed.

  • Other characters

    All other characters are removed from the strings in which they appear but do not separate words.

Note

  1. All characters that split words are discarded during indexing and searching.
  2. The previous statements apply to indexing. However, in a search query all characters that can be part of the search syntax are treated in that capacity and not as part of the search query. These are the plus ( + ) and minus ( - ) signs, double quotation marks ( " ), and the asterisk wild card character ( * ). If users want to include such characters in their search query, they must enclose them in double quotation marks. For example "+hello" searches for the string +hello; "*Hello*" searches for the string *Hello*.
  3. The less than ( < ) and greater than ( > ) symbols are special HTML characters that Search cannot handle.