Avoid Escaping Spaces in the Query String in a Solr Query

Following up on the previous post about escaping values in a Solr query string, it’s important to note that you should not escape spaces in the query itself. The reason for this is that if you escape spaces in the query “foo bar”, the search will be performed on the term “foo bar” itself, and not with “foo” as one term and “bar” as the other. This will only return documents that has the string “foo bar” in sequence.

The solution is to either remove the space from the escape list in the previous function – and use another function for escaping values where you actually should escape the spaces – or break up the string into “escapable” parts.

The code included beneath performs the last task; it splits the string into different parts delimited by space and then escapes each part of the query by itself.

      $queryParts = explode(' ', $this->getQuery());
      $queryEscaped = array();

      foreach($queryParts as $queryPart)
      {
      $queryEscaped[] = self::escapeSolrValue($queryPart);
      }
      $queryEscaped = join(' ', $queryEscaped);