Special Character is last character.

Question

Greetings All, I am running Oracle 11g and I am leveraging Oracle Text. I understand how to use printjoins and how to query via "contains". I can successfully query for a period and get back the desired result if the period is embedded mid string: e.g.) "john.paul.jones". However, when a period is the last characters: e.g.) "john.paul.jones." I cannot get the query to return the desired record. I looked in the I$ table and could not find the token "john.paul.jones.", what was there was "john.paul.jones". It seems that Oracle Text did not persist the string with the terminating period? Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
L

Answer 1

Look at the punctuations attribute of the lexer in the Text Reference [http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/text.111/b28304/cdatadic.htm#CCREF0218].
If the overall nature of your text collection isn't regular sentences, then you could remove periods as a punctuation character -- that is, if your text collection is something like email addresses, where periods don't mean what they usually mean.
If your collection is mainly regular sentences, and you don't want the period to be included as part of the token in most cases, you'll probably have to think about it in terms of processing the user's input -- that is, something like removing the trailing period from the search input in order to match what the tokenizer is doing to the raw text.