Django Watson can't search items with special characters with MySQL (UTF-8/InnoDB)

[kibershmiber]

Hi, guys!))
There is a big problem for me know with Watson(( Our searched items all contain "/" and "-" characters, and they can't be found through DW. With plain SQL they can be found perfect. What I should do in that case?

[kibershmiber]

Comooooone guys...

[valentijnscholten]

This is still a big issue, basically rendering the search powerless if you have '-' or similar in your titles (or contents)

[valentijnscholten]

Although it sounds like a bug in watson, it's more of a limitation of MySQL:

• https://medium.com/@aleksandrasays/today-i-learned-hyphen-is-a-delimiter-6ec5f4596b93
• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/full-text-adding-collation.html

Easiest workaround is to put the search query (or the word with dashes inside the search query) inside double quotes. This won't fix everything but at least you will get the results.

[etianen]

I'd take a MR that you think fixes this.