Safe to use prefix query on analysed field?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

The documentation on prefix queries states: "Matches documents that have fields containing terms with a specified prefix (not analyzed)".

I took this to mean that the mapping for the field had to be not_analized. However, after some experimentation, I found that it does sort of work on an analysed field, but the query is not analysed. Eg. I found I could use a custom analyser on the field that uses a keyword tokenizer and a lowercase token filter and, so long as I lower case the query string myself, I can use a prefix query to get a case insensitive prefix match.

So I am wondering if this is valid and, if so, am I alone in thinking the documentation is misleading? Perhaps it should state that the query is not analysed and to take care when matching on an analysed field?

  • David

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2

It means that the text you give to the prefix query is not analyzed.

So if you have in the inverted index

  • abc
  • def

And you search with prefix AB, it won’t work as abc does not start with AB

Make sense?

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David Pilato - Developer | Evangelist

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Le 28 avr. 2015 à 09:59, David Kemp davidbkemp@gmail.com a écrit :

The documentation on prefix queries states: "Matches documents that have fields containing terms with a specified prefix (not analyzed)".

I took this to mean that the mapping for the field had to be not_analized. However, after some experimentation, I found that it does sort of work on an analysed field, but the query is not analysed. Eg. I found I could use a custom analyser on the field that uses a keyword tokenizer and a lowercase token filter and, so long as I lower case the query string myself, I can use a prefix query to get a case insensitive prefix match.

So I am wondering if this is valid and, if so, am I alone in thinking the documentation is misleading? Perhaps it should state that the query is not analysed and to take care when matching on an analysed field?

  • David

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3

Yes, that makes sense.
I still think the documentation could make that a little more clear.
Thanks very much anyway!

Cheers,
David

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4

Well. If you’d like to enhance the documentation, feel free to send a pull request! :slight_smile:

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Le 29 avr. 2015 à 09:41, David Kemp davidbkemp@gmail.com a écrit :

Yes, that makes sense.
I still think the documentation could make that a little more clear.
Thanks very much anyway!

Cheers,
David

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