How to allow fulltext searching with hyphens in the search query

Question

I have keywords like "some-or-other" where the hyphens matter in the search through my mysql database. I'm currently using the fulltext function.

Is there a way to escape the hyphen character? I know that one option is to comment out #define HYPHEN_IS_DELIM in the myisam/ftdefs.h file, but unfortunately my host does not allow this. Is there another option out there?

Edit 3-8-11 Here's the code I have right now:

$search_input = $_GET['search_input'];
$keyword_safe = mysql_real_escape_string($search_input);
$keyword_safe_fix = "*'\"" . $keyword_safe . "\"'*";


$sql = "
    SELECT *,
        MATCH(coln1, coln2, coln3) AGAINST('$keyword_safe_fix') AS score
        FROM table_name
    WHERE MATCH(coln1, coln2, coln3) AGAINST('$keyword_safe_fix')
    ORDER BY score DESC
";

Answer 1

From here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html

One solution to find a word with a dashes or hyphens in is to use FULL TEXT SEARCH IN BOOLEAN MODE, and to enclose the word with the hyphen / dash in double quotes.

Or from here http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=2095

There is another workaround. It was recently added to the manual: " Modify a character set file: This requires no recompilation. The true_word_char() macro uses a “character type” table to distinguish letters and numbers from other characters. . You can edit the contents in one of the character set XML files to specify that '-' is a “letter.” Then use the given character set for your FULLTEXT indexes. "

Have not tried it on my own.

Edit: Here is some more additional info from here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-boolean.html

A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (“"”) characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. The full-text engine splits the phrase into words and performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. Prior to MySQL 5.0.3, the engine then performed a substring search for the phrase in the records that were found, so the match must include nonword characters in the phrase. As of MySQL 5.0.3, nonword characters need not be matched exactly: Phrase searching requires only that matches contain exactly the same words as the phrase and in the same order. For example, "test phrase" matches "test, phrase" in MySQL 5.0.3, but not before.

If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. For example, if all words are either stopwords or shorter than the minimum length of indexed words, the result is empty.