Text Indexing and Lookup - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 293

• For a fuzzy search (words like the search term), add a tilde character at the end,
as in database~ .
• Add a + in front of words and phrases that must occur. +exist database means
the text must include the word exist but may include the word database .
• Add a - in front of words and phrases that should not occur in the text.
• Boolean operators ( AND , OR , and NOT ) are supported.
• You can group expressions using parentheses.
The full-text query XML specification
The ft:query function also accepts an XML fragment that allows you to build a
query using Lucene's internal API indirectly. The XML is transformed into an inter‐
nal representation used by Lucene and then executed. This fragment takes the follow‐
ing form:
<query>
( term | wildcard | regex | phrase | near | bool )+
</query>
All subelements accept an optional boost attribute of type xs:float to specify a
boost value for the score (see “Scoring Searches” on page 296 ). The query element can
contain the following subelements:
• The term element defines a single term to search for. The following example
searches for text containing exist and/or database :
<query>
<term> exist </term>
<term> database </term>
</query>
• The wildcard element is the same as the term element but can contain a wild‐
card * or ? operator. To search for all text with words starting with data , use:
<query>
<wildcard> data* </wildcard>
</query>
• The regex element contains a regular expression used for the search.
• The phrase element searches for a group of terms in the correct order . It can con‐
tain text (which is tokenized into terms), or a number of term child elements.
The following two examples are equivalent:
<query>
<phrase> exist database </phrase>
</query>