escaping special characters while doing search doesn't seem to work

[Polina Litvak]

I was trying to search my index for a term of the form a*-b* (e.g.
ABC-DEFG). While tracing the code I noticed that Lucene breaks this term
into two terms, "ABC" and "DEFG". To prevent this, I tried escaping the
special character "-" with "\" to form the term "ABC\-DEFG" and now
Lucene search can't find this term in the index.
 
Does anyone know of this already ? Is this a bug, or I am doing
something wrong ?
 
Thanks, 
Polina