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How do we escape a wildcard for the case where we have a search with wildcards and need one or two escaped wildcards that should not serves as wildcards in the search?
We do not have escaping syntax for wildcards. We did not consider this an important use case, since the characters used for wildcarding are not likely to be searched and many implementations will choose not to support searching them. If you have a query where you want to search for such characters and want to use wildcards as well you would need to split query terms apart to be able to use "with wildcard" and "without wildcard" as appropriate. E.g. if you want to match * literally in "A*B.{2,3}C*D" you could write: ("A*" without wildcard) && ("B.{2,3}C" with wildcard) && ("*D" without wildcard) distance at most 0 ordered If you think escaping wildcards is important we have to reopen the discussion.
I promised to find the language we had for ecaping wildcards in a previous version. It follows: When "with wildcards" is present indicators and qualifiers must be escaped by a backslash (\ ) if they are to be read as punctuation marks rather than indicators and qualifiers. A period which is not an indicator must be preceded by a backslash to be read as a period. Similarly a question mark, asterisk, or plus sign which is not a qualifier must be preceded by a backslash to be read as a question mark, asterisk, or plus sign. Pat
The Task Force has accepted a proposal to align the Full-Text spec with the XQuery spec such that wildcards are escaped by preceding them with a backslash (\). Please mark this bug CLOSED if you are happy with the resolution.
Because you participated in the TF when this bug was resolved, we presume that your concerns are addressed appropriately. We are therefore marking this bug as CLOSED.