How to escape a special character?

[meltuhamy]

e.g. Is it possible to search for the character '^' using the search method? I do not want it to be interpreted as a search modifier (boost).

[olivernn]

At the moment the search string does not provide support for escaping characters. This is something that I want to add at some point.

In the mean time you can use lunr.Index#query directly to perform a search with a '^' character:

idx.query(function (q) {
  q.term("foo^")
})

[meltuhamy]

Thanks @olivernn , I actually looked at that before but then I was stuck trying to get the best of both worlds, e.g. title:n^2 - where I want to search the field 'title' but I want to search for the term 'n^2' without boosting anything. Any ideas as to how I can do this?

[olivernn]

Everything that is possible with a search string is possible with the lunr.Index#query method, lunr.Index#search is implemented on top of it.

idx.query(function (q) {
  q.term("n^2", { fields: ["title"] })
})

The documentation shows how to add fields, boosts etc.

[meltuhamy]

great, thanks @olivernn . Do you know how I can escape the wildcard * character? q.term('*') does a wildcard search...

[olivernn]

Its not possible to escape the wildcard character at the moment, and I think it'll be a bit tricky to implement. I'll think about the best way to do so when implementing escape sequences in the search string, but "*" has special meaning in a number of places that might be harder to sidestep.

[olivernn]

The latest alpha (2.1.0-alpha.2) includes support for escape query characters, e.g "12:00pm" will do a search for "12:00pm" rather than complain about a missing field called "12".

This does not include support for escaping asterisks "*", that requires some more fundamental changes that I'm not inclined to work on, yet.

As ever, try it out and let me know any feedback.

[olivernn]

I've just published 2.1.0 which includes support for escaping special characters.

[jeckep]

Excuse me, but I couldn't find the instruction how to use escaping for special charactes, could you please point me.

I try to search term "C#". But

idx.query(function (q) {
  q.term("C#")
});

didn't work.
I am also searching for possibility to search terms with characters: ":", "."

Thank you.

[wangpin34]

I cannot find any instruction about escaping the modifiers as well. @olivernn Any updates? thanks.

[wereHamster]

@wangpin34 I found this in our code, not sure where I got it from:

str.replace(/[~^\-+]/g, (x) => `\\${x}`)