It's possible to do leading wildcard searches in Lucene as of 2.1. See http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/LuceneFAQ#head-4d62118417eaef0dcb87f4370583f809848ea695 (http://tinyurl.com/366suf)
-----Original Message----- From: Oystein Reigem [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 11:31 AM To: java-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Wildcard searches with * or ? as the first character Hi, I have read that with Lucene it is not possible to do wildcard searches with * or ? as the first character. Wildcard searches with * as the first character (or both first and last character) are useful for text in languages that have a lot of compound words, like German and the Scandinavian languages. Some systems do offer such searches, but at a penalty. I assume such systems sometimes do a sequential search of the text, which is slow, and sometimes a sequential search of an index, which might be a bit faster, but still quite slow. But a slow search might be better than no search, as long as the user is aware of the consequences of doing wildcard searches starting with a wildcard character. Any comments? Cheers, - Øystein - -- Øystein Reigem, The department of culture, language and information technology (Aksis), Allegt 27, N-5007 Bergen, Norway. Tel: +47 55 58 32 42. Fax: +47 55 58 94 70. E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Home tel: +47 56 14 06 11. Mobile: +47 97 16 96 64. Home e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Aksis home page: <www.aksis.uib.no>. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
