Adding Fulltext search without punctuation

[Lester Brook]

Hi All,

I'm just starting out with fulltext searching and I've run into a problem:

I have added a fulltext index to a number of columns and those columns are data that contain apostrophes i.e. fisherman's and fishermans.

I was doing a “like %<search term>%” against them but I wanted to relevance rank the results so I'm now doing a “match() against()” search.

The problem is that, if someone enters "fishermans" in the search box the results containing the term "fishermans" only are returned.

if someone enters "fisherman's" into the search box it is converted to "fisherman''s" and is therefore recognized as "fishermans" and once again only records containing the term "fishermans" are found.

I was getting around this problem in the “like %<search term>%” search by putting a "REPLACE(<column name> , '''', '')" in.

Is there a way of building the fulltext index so that, if a column contains the term "fisherman's" for example, it will get indexed as "fishermans" instead? i.e. is there a way can you strip the punctuation out of the index when it is being built?

Thanks and hope someone can help.

- Lester.