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Creative ways to get around fulltext 4 char limitation?

Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 3:30 pm
by voltrader
I'm running MySQL 3.23, so it seems I can't change the ft_min_word_len variable to 3.

Are there any creative ways to do this?

There are so many 3-letter words that people search for... sigh...

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2005 9:23 am
by MrKnight

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2005 11:30 am
by pickle
Read the documentation on Full Text Search. Somewhere in there I believe there are instructions on how to change the limit - it's just in a config file I think.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 12:49 pm
by voltrader
I did read the manual. First thing I did.

"I'm running MySQL 3.23, so it seems I can't change the ft_min_word_len variable to 3. "

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 2:22 pm
by pickle

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 5:10 pm
by voltrader
You're ignoring what I wrote. I stated that I DID read the manual.

This is the gist of my post:
"I'm running MySQL 3.23, so it seems I can't change the ft_min_word_len variable to 3. "

This is from the manual:
"The minimum and maximum length of words to be indexed is defined by the ft_min_word_len and ft_max_word_len system variables (available as of MySQL 4.0.0)"

MySQL 3.23 vs MySQL 4.0.0

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 5:50 pm
by pickle
I wasn't ignoring your post, I was being a total knob by not even reading it. My apologies. :oops:

What if you padded your 3 character search strings with spaces. If I'm searching for 'IRA', 'IRA ' should also work should it not?

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 8:08 pm
by voltrader
You redeemed yourself with that one post :!:

In all seriousness, that's a good idea. I had heard the append-*-to-end-of-string idea, but I didn't want completely irrelevant results.

I'll report back on how "xxx " (+ space) matches with xxx in practice.