Azure search not working with special characters - azure

Question

I have a search setup for a list of jobs.
Other than Id field I have just two fields on the search made as searchable and analyzer standard.lucene as following:
And I’m having difficulty to make the search work with things like C# or C++.
 
As per the documentation for unsafe characters we should encode and for Special characters we should scape.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/query-lucene-syntax
 
But let’s say I want to search all jobs with C# on the title or description I do the following search using the encode %23 and does not seems that I'm getting the correct results. Is returning other jobs that contain only C with other things.
 
Same way if I want to get only the C++ jobs as per azure docs I should use something like C\+\+ When I tried a got other jobs also.
So not sure if I’m missing something or did not understand correct the documentation. But I’m not able to get the exact result I was expecting.

Answer 1

Your results depend on the analyzer you use. Read more about analyzers in the documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-analyzers
You can check how your query is analyzed by calling the analyze API with your query and a specified analyzer. For example:
{
"text": "C# engineer",
"analyzer": "standard"
}
Will result in:
"tokens": [
{
"token": "c",
"startOffset": 0,
"endOffset": 1,
"position": 0
},
{
"token": "engineer",
"startOffset": 3,
"endOffset": 11,
"position": 1
}
]
With the standard analyzer, you effectively no longer have the ability to separate a C# engineer from a C++ engineer. The analyzer will simplify it to two tokens. C. Engineer.
Instead, use one of the built-in analyzers or configure your own. Here is the same example using the whitespace analyzer.
{
"text": "C# engineer",
"analyzer": "whitespace"
}
Results in
"tokens": [
{
"token": "C#",
"startOffset": 0,
"endOffset": 2,
"position": 0
},
{
"token": "engineer",
"startOffset": 3,
"endOffset": 11,
"position": 1
}
]
CREATE
Create the index like this
"fields": [
{
"name": "Id",
"type": "Edm.String",
"searchable": false,
"filterable": true,
"retrievable": true,
"sortable": true,
"facetable": false,
"key": true,
"indexAnalyzer": null,
"searchAnalyzer": null,
"analyzer": null,
"synonymMaps": []
},
{
"name": "Title",
"type": "Edm.String",
"facetable": false,
"filterable": true,
"key": false,
"retrievable": true,
"searchable": true,
"sortable": true,
"analyzer": "whitespace",
"indexAnalyzer": null,
"searchAnalyzer": null,
"synonymMaps": [],
"fields": []
}
],
UPLOAD
Test by uploading the following simple content.
"value": [
{
"#search.action": "mergeOrUpload",
"Id": "1",
"Title": "C++ Engineer"
},
{
"#search.action": "mergeOrUpload",
"Id": "2",
"Title": "C# Engineer"
}
]
QUERY
Then query
https://{{SEARCH_SVC}}.{{DNS_SUFFIX}}/indexes/{{YOUR-INDEX}}/docs?search=C%23&$count=true&searchMode=all&queryType=full&api-version={{API-VERSION}}
Your search for C# now returns the entry with C# in the title.
{
"#odata.context": "https://walter-searchsvc-we-dev.search.windows.net/indexes('so-73954804')/$metadata#docs(*)",
"#odata.count": 1,
"value": [
{
"#search.score": 0.25811607,
"Id": "2",
"Title": "C# Engineer"
}
]
}