Question

FORMSOF THESAURUS throws errors for specific character. E.g. FORMSOF (THESAURUS, hel!lo) throws an error whereas FORMSOF (THESAURUS, hel?lo) works.

However, I did not find any documentation about which characters are allowed.

Can you help me out?

Answer 1

The Thesaurus is expecting a word or term:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc879300(v=sql.110).aspx

What I do in my .NET code is use a regex to remove all those special characters (basically leaving A-Z and 0-9.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa258227(v=sql.80).aspx

says:

word

Is a string of characters without
spaces or punctuation.

phrase

Is one or more words with spaces
between each word.

Make sure you have your stop words setup (I did have changed to have none of them in my code)

Stopwords

When defining a full-text query, the
Full-Text Engine discards stopwords
(also called noise words) from the
search criteria. Stopwords are words
such as “a,” “and,” “is,” or “the,”
that can occur frequently but that
typically do not help when searching
for particular text. Stopwords are
listed in a stoplist. Each full-text
index is associated with a specific
stoplist, which determines what
stopwords are omitted from the query
or the index at indexing time. For
more information, see Stopwords and
Stoplists.

There is also an awesome library for .net here: (I used that to transform phrases in full text queries)
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Full-Text+Search+(2008)/64248/

EDIT:
This might help:
Note that I did replace ‘s to nothing or else That’s becomes Thats and would be a no match.

search = search.Replace("’s", "");
search = Regex.Replace(search, @"[#$%&()*“”+,./:;<=>!?@[\\\]^_`’{|}~]", "");