Searching with '.' in the expression doesn't work as expected

[GroovyBee]

If I use digits separated by a full stop e.g. 2.3 as part of a search pattern the search box removes the '.' so you end up searching for 23. Surrounding it in quotes doesn't help either. It makes it hard to find things with version numbers mentioned in posts.

[Albert]

I'll look to see if there's a way of allowing the period when searching.

 

..Al

[Albert]

So, I looked through the Sphinx documentation a bit. The period is treated as a separator, just as a space is, so it is not preserved when the query engine generates indicies. Which makes sense, since the period is a commonly used punctuation mark. It is possible to add the period to the character set the engine uses to recognize words to be indexed, but then you'll end up with words with periods in the search index (as well as decimal numbers). You then have to enable partial word searching, which would hugely increase the size of the search index and slow down querying as a result. This would also muddle search results as you'd get back quite a few more results, especially for shorter search terms that are part of longer words. I don't really see a feasible solution, unfortunately.

 

..Al

[GroovyBee]

Thanks for investigating Al.

[Albert]

I do see a possible solution:

 

http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/1.10/conf-blend-chars.html

 

This may work, and I was about to try this until I discovered the version of Sphinx running on AtariAge doesn't have this feature. I need to make sure I can upgrade Sphinx without causing any issues.

 

..Al

[Albert]

Whoops, had to change this post, as I can't link directly to the thread on Invision's site since the support forums are only available to customers. Basically, there's a function in the forum that's stripping out various characters and strips them out, including the period. I'll have to modify this as well, once I get Sphinx upgraded and verify it's working without issues (before I even try to enable the blend_chars directive).

 

Fun fun!

 

..Al

[Albert]

I just noticed the link to the Advanced Search Page is missing from the skin (there should be a small icon next to to the right of the magnifying glass). I wonder how long that's been like that! Must fix!!

 

..Al

[Albert]

It works! :D

 

Please try some searches to see if you're getting the results you're expecting. Hopefully there are no side effects of what I just did. The search index is be a bit larger (since more terms are added to the index), but shouldn't really affect anything. If you see anything odd, please let me know.

 

Thanks,

 

..Al

[GroovyBee]

I searches but when you click on the thread title you get a File not found error.

[Albert]

I searches but when you click on the thread title you get a File not found error.

 

LOL, of course it does. Damn Invision. Let me see if I can track that down. Nothing can be simple! It's possible this is a bug that has already been fixed in a newer version of the software. We're running 3.3.4 and Invision is about to release 3.4.2 (which has some significant changes, mostly under the hood). I'll look through the bug reports before I start digging through code.

 

..Al

[Albert]

I see the problem, the URL is malformed due to the period in the search term:

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/207607-searching-with-in-the-expression-doesnt-work-as-expected/page__hl__%2B2.3

 

If you remove everything starting with the "page_hl...", the link will work. The purpose of this variable is to highlight the search term on the page. Since Invision normally strips this character out of the search terms, it's no surprise that these results are now broken when including a period in the search term. Thus, I doubt it's something Invision would have fixed on their own. I'll have to devise a fix of my own.

 

..Al

[GroovyBee]

Thanks for coming up with a workaround.

[Albert]

Alright, the search results should now work properly. Btw, if you use the advanced page (which I linked above), you can return the results as posts. This is very useful when searching, and I'm not sure why it's not the default results view (may see if I can change that).

 

..Al