Re: Text search lexer's handling of hyphens and negatives

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 3:35 PM Alan Hodgson <ahodgson(at)lists(dot)simkin(dot)ca> wrote:
> My company has found the pg_trm extension to be more useful for partial text searches than the full text functions. I don't know specifically how it might help with your hyphens but it would be worth testing. The docs actually suggest using them in conjunction in some cases.

We actually do use pg_trgm already for the names/titles of things.
Indexing the content with a trigram index and then doing
LOWER(content) LIKE '%789-xyz%' would certainly work, but
1. we'd have to do a little bit of finagling if we wanted to match on
word boundaries (don't match '6789-xyza' in the above example)
2. trigram indexes are pretty huge for long documents, which is why we
currently only use them for names/titles

We may give up and just use pg_trgm for contents if nothing else works
out but it feels like the text search lexer is _so_ close to what we
want.