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Table of Contents

Defining allowed characters Note
  • Home
  • Fotoware On-Premises
  • Index Manager
  • Optimizing the search engine (On-Premises)

Defining the characters that are recognized by the search engine

Controlling how Index Manager treats special characters in assets' metadata.

30. April 2025

Elaine Foley

Table of Contents

Defining allowed characters Note

Defining allowed characters

Where: C:\Programdata\Fotoware\Index Manager\Index Control\english.abc

Index Manager operates with Unicode, as does XMP. Consequently, all special characters will be indexed and searchable. However, there may be reasons why you would want to treat certain characters in a special way. That's where english.abc can help.

English.abc is a text file and can be edited with Notepad, for example.

It consists of four nodes or blocks of character definitions.

Note

  • A character may only occur in one of the nodes. Consequently, you will get strange search results if, for example, the backslash character is listed both under [Letters] and [Ignore].
  • After changing the english.abc file, you must restart the Index Manager service and rebuild any existing indexes.

[Letters]

This section contains valid letters that the indexing engine will allow. Because Index Manager uses Unicode, the letters A-Z are in the list only for historical reasons. You will be able to add additional characters to the list by adding them at the bottom. For example, if you want to index a backslash (\) as a valid, searchable character, insert it four times in the list below Z:

z z Z z

\ \ \ \

[Hyphens]

Characters defined as hyphens will be construed both as searchable characters in their own right and as a space.

Hence, Reuters/Photographer can be searched for using that phrase exactly, but it could also be found using (Reuters photographer)

Important: Hyphens can only be used once per string. Therefore, they cannot, for example, be used for date fields that contain more than one dash (-) as separators.

[Spaces]

These characters are construed as spaces in the search engine. As you can see from the included english.abc file, the underscore (_) character is, by default, construed as a space.

[Ignore]

The search engine will completely ignore the characters listed here, and the remaining indexed string will be contracted.

recognized characters search engine

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