Marklogic search with ampersand

Question

Suppose I am searching using one of the cts:query API's. I am looking for documents containing the phrase "John and Jane". Some of my documents have "John & Jane"(actually John & Jane) in them. I want them to be returned as well. Also consider reverse situation.

Does Marklogic provide any options to do that?

Answer 1

Queries expressed as cts:query items or XML are easy to rewrite with XQuery typeswitch expressions. The discussion list thread at http://markmail.org/message/6hxmuqnpnfm73j4n has an example of something similar.

Answer 2

Mike gives a good suggestion, but it might be worth to take a step back and look at your problem first. From your comment on Mike's answer I take it that you look for something like thesaurus expansion, but for the 'and' and '&' instead of the other words.

I may be wrong, but to my knowledge MarkLogic doesn't provide features to take care of something like that automatically. Functions like search:search and search:parse are powerfull, but don't go that far. You are up to your own to take a search string like yours, break it into parts manually to wrap it in a cts:query, or use something like search:parse for that, and then pull tricks like that of Mike to walk through your query-tree, and expand any particular search query node you would like to expand in a particular way.

The markmail thread to which Mike points, gives an example of how to walk a query-tree, and manipulate it. A little heavy for this particular case, but there is a thesaurus module that can help in various general cases. The following chapter of the Search Dev Guide explains its features, and ends with a small example of how to apply it:

http://docs.marklogic.com/guide/search-dev/thesaurus#chapter

HTH!

Answer 3

Assume your term to search is "John & Jane"

In order to Search above word ,you can use following line

let $inputSearchDetails ="John & Jane"

let $InputXML := xdmp:unquote($inputSearchDetails, "", ("format-xml", "repair-full"))