[Koha-bugs] [Bug 28884] ElasticSearch: Question mark in title search returns no results

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=28884

--- Comment #12 from Janusz Kaczmarek <januszop at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Katrin Fischer from comment #11)
> ? and * are quite common for truncation and databases and the like, people
> have been writing tutorials on Elasticsearch etc. like:
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/17-YVjG6IJKeDmDCKuF7ZYvcTfzDYyxwa/view 
> That's also been promoted on the BywaterSolutions blog. 
> 
> So next question would be, why * and ? are handled differently... could the
> behaviour of Elasticsearch removing the ending ? be changed?

The fundamental differences between ? and * are:

1. * very rarely would be present in ordinary users' copy-paste queries,
2. even if, * means '0 or more characters' (like /.*/ in Perl) -- so it would
not create problems -- whereas ? means _exactly_ one character (like Perlish
/./) -- and therefor is quite problematic in the context we are in.

Still, I would not expect from the users of the catalogue the knowledge about
quite advanced, wildcarded ES queries... s/he is usually is not interested in
what is in the back-end.  Hence, I would prefer to prepare Koha to first
"understand" a normal user instead of advanced search engines operator.

And still, the basic scenario is: the user does copy-paste search and does not
get the result -- which for him/her (and therefor for me) is not acceptable.

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