Question

I have a problem and Google hasn’t helped me much. I’m trying figure out a way to ignore HTML while searching a Solr index in ColdFusion (9).

For example, if I search for microsoft and my index contains Microsoft© makes Windows® I’m prompted to search for “Microsoft© makes Windows®” rather than showing the actual result.

As you can see below, I’m just passing the string into the criteria property of cfsearch – but again – doing this produces (what I consider to be) a “dirty” result.

  <cfsearch
      collection="mycollection"
      criteria="microsoft"
      name="results"
      maxrows="100"
      suggestions="always"
      contexthighlightbegin="<strong>"
      contextHighlightEnd="</strong>"
      contextPassages="3"
      />

I’ve been looking at the documentation for Solr’s query syntax but I don’t see anything that jumps out at me on how to avoid this problem.

Should I look at providing the index a “flat” version of text or is there a way to avoid HTML strings such as © / ® / ™?

I’m open to suggestions.

— Brian.

Answer 1

For anyone that might be faced with the same question:

The solution for this question was to use an alternate method of indexing rather than trying to work around the HTML within the index.

Within the database I created a new field called index_search and on my insert method within my application I used a regex to omit any special(er) characters: "[^[:word:].[:space:]-]"

From there, I passed the index_search field to the body of cfindex and used the HTML name as the title:

  <cfindex
    collection="mycollection"
    action="update"
    body="name_search,html_description"
    title="name_html"
    key="UUID"
    query="data">

Using this method produced the expected output when searching for words or phrases close to, or, wrapped in HTML. IE: Searching microsoft would lists all results with Microsoft© within it.