SolrQuery and escaping special characters

[Paolo Castagna <ca...@googlemail.com>]

Hi,
I am using Solr v1.4 and SolrJ on the client side.

I am not sure how SolrJ behaves regarding "escaping" special characters
[1] in a query string.

SolrJ does URL encoding of the query string it sends to Solr.

Do I need to escape special characters [1] when I construct a SolrQuery
object or not?

For example, if I want to search for "http://example.com#foo" in a
"uri" field, should I use:

  (a)  SolrQuery query = new SolrQuery("uri:http://example.com#foo");
  (b)  SolrQuery query = new SolrQuery("uri:http\\://example.com#foo");

which become respectively:

  (a') q=uri%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%23foo
  (b') q=uri%3Ahttp%5C%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%23foo

My understanding is that SolrJ users are supposed to escape special 
characters, therefore (b) is the correct way.

If this is the case, what's the best way to escape a query string which
might contain field names and URIs in their field values?

Thanks,
Paolo

  [1] 
http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_9_1/queryparsersyntax.html#Escaping%20Special%20Characters

Re: SolrQuery and escaping special characters

[Lance Norskog <go...@gmail.com>]

Thank you for the example, Ahmet!

Paolo- what you did in choice 'b' does what you want - it escapes the
colon in the URI. But Ahmet's example is a better way because it does
not have the 'double-escaping' problem that us old Unix types are so
familiar with.

On 6/18/10, Chris Hostetter <ho...@fucit.org> wrote:
>
> : I am not sure how SolrJ behaves regarding "escaping" special characters
> : [1] in a query string.
>
> SolrJ encodes your strings for "transport" -- ie: it handles URL escaping
> if it's sending hte query in a GET URL -- but id doesn't do "query parser
> escaping" ... mainly because it has no way of knowing which query parser
> you are using.
>
>
> -Hoss
>
>


-- 
Lance Norskog
goksron@gmail.com

Re: SolrQuery and escaping special characters

[Chris Hostetter <ho...@fucit.org>]

: I am not sure how SolrJ behaves regarding "escaping" special characters
: [1] in a query string.

SolrJ encodes your strings for "transport" -- ie: it handles URL escaping 
if it's sending hte query in a GET URL -- but id doesn't do "query parser 
escaping" ... mainly because it has no way of knowing which query parser 
you are using.


-Hoss

Re: SolrQuery and escaping special characters

[Ahmet Arslan <io...@yahoo.com>]

> My understanding is that SolrJ users are supposed to escape
> special characters, therefore (b) is the correct way.
> If this is the case, what's the best way to escape a query
> string which
> might contain field names and URIs in their field values?

Easiest thing is to use RawQParserPlugin or FieldQParserPlugin.

e.g. SolrQuery.setQuery("{!field f=uri}http://www.apache.org")