I am using Azure Search and trying to perform a search against documents:
It seems as though doing this: /indexes/blah/docs?api-version=2015-02-28&search=abc\-1003
returns the same results as this: /indexes/blah/docs?api-version=2015-02-28&search=abc-1003
Shouldn't the first one return different results than the second due to the escaping backwards slash? From what I understand the backwards slash should allow for an exact search on the whole string of "abc-1003" instead of doing a "not" operator.
(more info here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn798920.aspx)
The only way I can get it to work is by doing this (note the double quotes): /indexes/blah/docs?api-version=2015-02-28&search="abc-1003"
I would rather not do that because that would mean making the user enter in the quotes, which they will not know how to do.
Am I expecting something I shouldn't or is it possibly a bug with Azure Search?
First, a dash not prefaced by a whitespace acts like a dash, not a negation operator.
As per the MSDN docs for simple query syntax
- Only needs to be escaped if it's the first character after whitespace, not if it's in the middle of a term. For example, "wi-fi" is a single term
Second, unless you are using a custom analyzer for your index, the dash will be treated by the analyzer almost like white-space and will break abc-1003 into two tokens, abc and 1003.
Then when you put it in quotes"abc-1003" it will be treated as a search for the phrase abc 1003, thus returning what you expect.
If you want to exact match on abc-1003 consider using a filter instead. It is faster and can matching things like guids or text with dashes