How to search a term with a middle dash in azure search?

Question

I'm learning to use azure search and I dont find a way to search a term with a middle dash into the ItemId field, doesn't care if the term to search it's at the beginning or at the middle.

I have these fields with data in my index

+-----+--------------------+-------------+
| Cat |       ItemId       | Description |
+-----+--------------------+-------------+
| 100 |  400800-1100103U   | desc item 1 |
| 100 |  400800-11001066   | desc item 2 |
| 100 |  400800-11001068   | desc item 3 |
| 101 |  400800-110010F6   | desc item 4 |
+-----+--------------------+-------------+

This is my index field configuration:

+-------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+
| Field Name  | Retrievable | Filerable |  Sortable | Facetable | Searchable |
+-------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+
| Cat         |    OK       |    OK     |    OK     |    OK     |    X       |
| ItemId      |    OK       |    OK     |    OK     |    OK     |    OK      |
| Description |    OK       |           |           |           |            |
+-------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------+

And this is my custom analyzer to the field ItemId to generate just one token even if has a middle dash.

{
  "@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Azure.Search.CustomAnalyzer",
  "name": "keyword_lowercase",
  "tokenizer": "keyword_v2",
  "tokenFilters": [
    "lowercase"
  ],
  "charFilters": []
}

If I search with this query: $select=RowKey&search=400800-1100*

I get these results:

400800-1100103U
400800-11001066
400800-11001068
400800-110010F6

But if I try to search with a middle term like this: $select=RowKey&search=RowKey:(00800-1100*)~

I get 0 results.

So how can I search a term with a middle dash into the ItemId, doesn't care if the term to search it's at the beginning or at the middle?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 24 '20 at 17:34

I remove the analyzer and change the GET by a POST using this code in the body of the request.

{  
    "queryType": "full",
    "search": "/.*00-11.*/",
    "searchFields": "ItemId",
    "select": "ItemId",
    "count": true,
    "top": 10
}

Using the full query property with Lucene syntax analyzer and a regex, the search works as expected.

Note that if you try to use this regex in the query search explorer in azure, this doesn't return any result. I think that it's because the search explorer use a GET request.

thanks for the answer Corom - MSFT. It works. I just want to answer with more clarify

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 24 '20 at 00:52

I believe that this post answers your question by using regular expression search but has some considerations. Alternatively you can consider using fuzzy search or use the Edge N-gram tokenizer with a reverse token filter depending on your specific scenario.

How to search a term with a middle dash in azure search?

2 Answers2

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