[Koha] Searching problem

[Eric Phetteplace]

Hi Dibyendra,

Since the searches work when you omit the colon, I suspect that it is being
treated as a special character and not interpreted literally, causing
queries to fail. I know that authority searches look like "an:510335" so I
think the role of a colon is to separate an index ("an" for "authority
number") from the value being looked for in that index (in this case, the
identifier 510335). I also see a query like "Provider:Oxford University
Press" so your searches might fail because "Bhutan: new pathways to growth"
means, to Zebra, *search the "Bhutan" index for the value "new pathways to
growth"*.

In a few test searches on our Koha, using the advanced search field and
performing a Title Phrase query on the full title, including the colon,
works. I suspect that if you want keyword searches with colons to work you
need to escape the colon somehow, though I don't know Zebra well enough to
know how to do that. Is there any reason why you can't just omit the
colons? Why are they required? If you could link to your Koha instance or
provide more details on how you're searching (using keyword searches? using
the advanced search form?) that would help us troubleshoot.

Best,

ERIC PHETTEPLACE Systems Librarian (he/him)

ephetteplace at cca.edu | o 510.594.3660

5212 Broadway | Oakland, CA | 94618

:(){ :|: & };:


On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 8:03 AM Dibyendra Hyoju <dibyendra at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I am having trouble searching some of the records in the database having a
> colon ":" punctuation mark in the titles such as "Marx at the Margins: On
> Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies", "Bhutan: new pathways
> to growth", "Dayananda Sarasvati: his life and ideas", etc. However, I
> could search these records without typing a colon punctuation mark during
> the search just like "Bhutan new pathways to growth", "Dayananda Sarasvati
> his life and ideas". The complete title is in the 245a tag field without
> using remainder of the title. What could be the problem? I have rebuilt the
> index by issuing koha-rebuild-zebra -f -v <instance> twice but some of the
> titles mentioned above are still not searchable using full title including
> colon punctuation mark. I'd appreciate if anyone in the list could share
> the solution to this issue. Thank you.
>
> --
> Dibyendra Hyoju
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